


Shadow in the Stream

by Azul_Bleu



Category: Marvel (Movies), The Avengers (2012), The Avengers - All Fandoms
Genre: Community: avengerkink, M/M, Tony hates magic, quantum!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-29
Updated: 2013-04-22
Packaged: 2017-11-06 06:06:43
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 24,897
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/415580
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azul_Bleu/pseuds/Azul_Bleu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Caught in the grips of spectacular hangovers, the Avengers wish Tony wasn't around to enable them, and a power decides to grant them their wish: a world without Tony Stark. How do you change reality back to normal without your resident genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, anyway?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Inside your heart where the darkness stays

**Author's Note:**

> _I am not rocks  
>  I am not rain  
> I'm just another shadow in the stream  
> That's been washed away after all these years  
> I am not rocks in the river  
> I am bursting in tears for it_
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Title, chapter titles and above all from 'Rocks' by Ryan Adams

\--- 

In retrospect, Bruce thought, he should have seen this coming. He should be above it, even. He knew that Tony wasn’t to blame, but there he was, and he was too easy a target to resist. In the heat of the moment, Bruce was so angry that he was shocked he wasn’t green yet. They were all furious, and Tony just stood there and took it.

“Guys, relax. It was just a party! You all had fun. No one got hurt. Minimal property damage, even. Apart from the hangovers, where’s the harm?”

“It’s about lack of respect,” Steve said. “I thought I couldn’t get drunk.”

“Were you born without an off button?” Clint demanded. 

“If those photos aren’t off the internet by the end of the day, you won’t even see me coming,” Natasha promised. 

“What if I hurt someone?” Bruce asked. 

Tony looked genuinely confused, and maybe a little hurt, but he took it like he never expected anything different. But he muttered his apologies, and slunk off to his workshop to leave the rest of them nursing their epic hangovers. 

“I thought you and he were all buddy-buddy, anyway,” Clint muttered. 

Bruce tried to remember that technique he learned in Nepal to avoid throwing up all over the breakfast bar. “He just… I know the Hulk doesn’t scare him, but he shouldn’t have risked it. I could have hurt someone.”

Natasha looked up from her orange juice. “I haven’t been drunk since 2005.”

“I’ll see that and raise you 1941,” Steve countered, his gaze dark and murderous.

Clint groaned and buried his head in his arms. “Can we just stop talking until the Advil kicks in? I wish Stark had never been fucking _born_.”

\--- 

Steve spent most of his day after trying to piece the night before back together. His memory was patchy, spotted with black outs and alarming periods of whirling colour and sound. 

He really hadn’t expected Tony to take his challenge seriously. When he’d met Steve’s “I can’t get drunk” with “that just means you’ve never really tried”, the last thing Steve had wanted was this horrible feeling of nausea, pain and creeping dread that, apparently, was tequila’s parting gift. So maybe he had met Tony’s eyes with a defiant look and said, “Give it your best shot.” That hadn’t meant that Tony should _listen_. 

Steve and Natasha lounged on the daybeds beside the Tower’s pool, the floor to ceiling windows tinted thanks to JARVIS. Natasha had made them some kind of traditional Russian hangover cure, and Steve punctuated wallowing in misery with tentative sips. 

“I’m going to kill him,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact. 

“No you’re not.”

“No, I’m not. But only because it would make Pepper cry,” Natasha replied. “What Clint said was harsh, but sometimes I think my job would be so much easer if he had never been born.”

Steve chuckled, despite the twinge that thought gave him. “I might actually be the one in charge.”

“Bruce would stop eyeing chopsticks with suspicion.”

“Clint would come in off the roof.”

“Fury would stop glaring.”

“Hey, let’s not get ahead of ourselves, here,” Steve said, and she smiled. It was moments like this, moments of quiet downtime with one or more of his team, that Steve felt like he was finally home. 

A memory flashed through his aching brain and he winced. “Did we… did I do something called a motorboat to you last night?” he asked.

Natasha smiled again, and this time it was terrifying. “Let’s just pretend you still can’t remember, shall we?”

Steve’s hangover slunk off in defeat somewhere around early afternoon, and he left Natasha to spend the rest of the day taking out his rage on one of the reinforced punching bags in the Tower’s gym. By dinner, he felt almost normal, although the dark expressions of his team-mates told him he was the only one. Tony was missing, sequestered in his lab until everyone decided that he was welcome again. 

Despite feeling better than everyone else, Steve still cast a dark thought or two Tony’s way before he fell asleep. Maybe the world would be better off without Tony Stark.

\--- 

And somewhere, something smiled, a glint in its eye, and power unfurled. 

_As you wish._

\--- 

Steve’s first thought was that his alarm hadn’t gone off. The sun was streaming through his untinted window and Steve felt muggy and strange. “JARVIS, you didn’t wake me. Why not?”

Silence. Steve scrubbed a hand through his hair and sat up. 

And then flew to his feet. 

This was _not_ his room in the Tower. The window had flowy curtains shifting in the breeze, and the door was in the wrong place, and there was no gramophone resting on his bureau, a ‘Happy Defrosting-versary’ gift from Tony. 

Steve grabbed his shield, still at its usual place by his bed, thank God, and started to creep towards the door, ears straining for any noise out of place. 

Something started chirping shrilly, and he nearly smashed it before he recognised a cell phone vibrating its way along a bedside table. It wasn’t his Starkphone, so it took him a moment to figure out how to answer. 

“Rogers.”

“Steve! Uhh, I mean, Captain Rogers, this is… uhh, this may seem strange, but…”

“Bruce, what is it?” Steve snapped, trying to calm down but the tension in Bruce’s voice was just racketing up his own. 

“You remember me?” Bruce blurted. 

“What? Of course I do. What’s going on?”

There was silence on the other end of the line before Bruce sighed heavily. “I think something really, really bad is happening.”

“Where are you?” Steve asked, stalking out of the bedroom into the rest of the tiny apartment, looking for some paper and pen. 

“I think… I think I’m back in India,” Bruce replied, and Steve paused. 

“India?”

“Yeah. I’m on a payphone in Kolkata, okay, this is really fucking weird, and I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

Bruce swearing was about as rare as Steve, and Steve felt his combat instincts kick into gear. “Okay, okay, relax, you have this number, and I’ll come get you as soon as I can.” He didn’t know when that would be, but even if he had to hijack the Helicarrier itself he wouldn’t leave a team-member stranded and scared. 

“Yeah, I… yeah, okay, Cap. I just have this really bad feeling. I tried to call Tony but I got a not-in-service message. Not even JARVIS.”

Steve had that feeling, too. They needed more information. “Do you have a number I can contact you on?”

Bruce laughed, a brittle sound. “I’m in the slums in India, Cap, but one thing they do have is phones. I’ll get one and contact you with it ASAP, okay?”

“Okay. Just… keep your head down and stay calm. I’m going to try and contact the rest of the team. I’ll keep you in the loop.”

“Yeah. I’m… I’m glad you remember me, Cap.”

Steve sighed. “You, too, Bruce.”

\--- 

The apartment Steve woke in was pathetically sparse. There was the bedroom, with its tallboy of drawers, a bed and bedsides, and nothing else, and an open plan kitchen/living room, with a table, a couch and a desk. Even for a man used to living out of a pack during war time, this place struck Steve as depressing. It wasn’t a home, that was for sure. 

Steve started by tearing it apart for a clue, a hint, a lead, _anything_. He figured out early into his day that he was in Brooklyn, and the apartment that was apparently his, thanks to the mail on his kitchen table. If the guns in the couch – his _couch_ , seriously, that couldn’t be safe – were any indication, he hadn’t become a civilian overnight.

His StarkTablet, like his StarkPhone, wasn’t anywhere in the apartment, and the laptop on the desk in his living room presented a problem: he couldn’t remember his password. He didn’t usually need one; JARVIS responded to his voice and his phone scanned his thumbprint. 

He found an address book, an honest to God paper address book, the kind that would send Tony into fits of hysterical laughter if he were to see Steve with it, but he didn’t recognise a single name. His phone was hard to navigate, all buttons and clumsy screens, none of the sleek touch navigation and voice control that his StarkPhone had. 

He finally managed to find the contacts list, and frowned as he scrolled. There were fewer than ten numbers listed, and none of them were familiar, same as the address book. 

He didn’t have many options at this point, so with a mental shrug, he dialled the first one. 

“Captain.”

Steve’s stomach dropped. “Agent Coulson?” 

“You’re on stand-down status, Captain, is there anything you need?”

Steve couldn’t quite piece together his thoughts, not with a dead man talking down the phone. “No, no, I… I hit the wrong button.”

“Fine. Call if you need anything.” And just like that, Coulson hung up on him. 

Steve couldn’t stop his hand shaking for ten minutes, and it took him another ten to dial the next number on the list. 

“Steve? Is that you?”

Relief swamped him and he unclenched his jaw. “Clint, are you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m fine, but something weird is going on.”

Steve laughed hoarsely. “Yeah, I got that. Where are you?”

Clint hummed, and there was the sound of traffic in the background. “Somewhere in Brooklyn, I think. I woke up in this tiny fucking room, man, and it’s some kind of SHIELD facility, but I mentioned the helicarrier and all I got were blank looks.”

“I’m in Brooklyn, too, think you can get out and find me?”

Clint scoffed. “Captain, I am _insulted_. Where are you?”

Steve gave him the address from the envelopes. “Be careful, Hawkeye. Until we know what the situation is, treat everyone with suspicion.”

“That actually hurt to say, didn’t it?”

“I mean it, Clint.”

“Yeah, I get it. I’ll be there in forty.”

Steve spent the time waiting for Clint trying not to fret and failing. He had food in his fridge so he ate, tasting nothing and imagining all his team-mates in various dire situations while he had grilled cheese. 

Clint’s first words when Steve opened the door were: “Heard from the Widow?”

Steve shook his head. “No. I tried all the numbers in my phone, they all lead to SHIELD, except yours.”

Clint nodded. “Mine, too. I nearly shat myself looking at the outdated tech in the SHIELD building. Tony would have kittens.”

“I know, check that thing out,” Steve said, waving a hand at his laptop. “I’ve been in this century for less than two years and even _I_ know that’s outdated.”

Clint froze. “You think we’ve gone back in time?”

Steve managed not to roll his eyes. “No, check the date on your phone. It’s just… things are wrong. Lots of things.”

Clint nodded, and his face went dark. “So what do we do, Cap?”

Steve’s jaw tightened. “Assemble the team.”

Bruce was in India, Widow was MIA, but Tony should have been fairly easy to locate. When Clint found a post-it with Steve’s password behind the desk, he managed to get into his computer. 

It was different. Of course it was, but Steve found himself staring helplessly at the screen and its strange little symbols. “Clint?”

Clint wandered over, sandwich in hand. “What’s up, Cap?”

“I don’t know how to get to the internet.”

Clint blinked. “You’re running Windows Vista? Jesus. Tony would actually kill you.”

“Just help me, please.”

“Fine, fine. Click that little fox there.”

Google, luckily, was the same. Steve knew Google. Steve had relied on it to the extent that it was almost like finding an old friend alive and well. 

He typed in ‘Tony Stark’. 

The results it spat back at him were enough to send a chill through his blood. 

Links to Stane Industries. Some other person’s LinkedIn profile. 

An obituary.

“Shit,” Clint breathed, hand tightening on Steve’s shoulder.

Steve couldn’t agree more. Trying to ignore the fact that his hand was shaking, he clicked on a news article. 

‘Anthony Edward Stark, born March 3rd 1970, died today, October 26th 1989, just over two years after the deaths of his parents. President of Stark Industries, Obadiah Stane, released this statement:

‘“Today, we’ve lost not only one of the greatest minds our time has seen, but a boy on the brink of becoming a man. Most people didn’t understand Tony, but he died doing what was right, trying to make a difference, and I know that’s all he ever really wanted. Those of us who knew him will never forget him, and for those of you who didn’t, I am truly sorry. We’re all the lesser for his loss.”

‘Stark was shot in an alley in Manhattan in the early hours of this morning. Witnesses say he was attempting to stop an assault in progress, when the attacker turned his gun on Stark and fired three close-range shots to the chest. The suspect is still at large and police welcome any information.

‘Paramedics responded around 4:30 am, but Stark was pronounced dead at the scene.’

Steve felt like the air had been sucked out of the room. The computer screen before him swam, and he realised his eyes had begun to tear up. 

“What the fuck is going on?” Clint whispered, and all Steve could do was shake his head and try not to cry. 

The silence was broken by Steve’s horrible shrill ringtone, and he tried to wipe his eyes discreetly on his way to answer it. 

“Rogers.”

“Captain.”

“Natasha, oh thank God you’re okay—”

“Hey, is that Nat? Lemme talk to her!” Clint launched himself across the room and Steve fended him off with one hand, trying to hear Natasha on the other end of the line. 

“Is that Clint?” she asked. 

“Yeah, he’s with me, we’re in Brooklyn. Status?” he asked, giving Clint a glare that backed him off. 

“I’m in Russia,” she said, and Steve swore. “Agreed.”

Steve tried to think of how to delicately broach the subject. “Are you… Is SHIELD running your op?”

She laughed. “Yes, Cap, I’m still one of you. I’m waiting to get debriefed; apparently my op ended yesterday.”

“That’s good. Good. Hopefully they’ll bring you back here.”

“You’ve seen that Tony’s dead?” she asked, blunt as always. 

“Yeah,” Steve managed to reply, voice choked. “Bruce checked in, he’s okay. He’s in India, I don’t know where.”

It was her turn to swear. “I know exactly where. Okay, Cap, I’ll get Banner and we’ll come to you. Anything else?”

“No, I don’t think so. Let me know if you get any intel.”

He could almost see her smirk. “Roger, Rogers.”

“Be safe, Nat,” he said, passing the phone to Clint and walking out of the apartment to give them space. 

His apartment was part of a large block, his front door onto a long hall of identical doors and cracked, yellowing lino. If Tony was dead, then there was no Avengers Tower to live in, so that part finally made sense, at least. It was a little sobering to get a taste of the life he almost had, waking up in a future with no Tony to take him in, kicking and screaming though it had been. 

Clint poked his head out of Steve’s apartment. “Steve, you better check this out.”

Clint had pulled up a news website on Steve’s computer, and his attention was immediately on the photographs scrolling across the top of the page. Bloody, screaming faces, explosions, rubble and dust. ‘Hostilities in Afghanistan escalate further; Coalition forces suffer heavy losses in mountain campaign.’

“What is this?” Steve whispered. 

Clint clicked through link after link, and they all showed the same thing. Violent mayhem. The death toll that the articles cited was obscene, in the tens of thousands of US soldiers alone, thousands in this campaign alone. The weaponry that the guerrillas were using was advanced, apparently, and the DoD were trying to tamp down on rampant intelligence leaks and compromised networks. 

“I think it’s because Tony isn’t here,” Clint said. 

Steve jerked out of his horrified trance. “What do you mean?”

Clint shrugged, opening yet another article about a massacred village. “You know how he got taken in Afganistan, before you woke up?” Steve nodded. “Then his company stopped making weapons. He started hunting down the weapons Stane sold under the table to the other guys. Yeah, most of those weapons Tony designed, but not all of them. So there’s no Tony here, which means Stane never stops selling.”

“And he doesn’t even have to try and be subtle about it, because no Tony to trick,” Steve finished. “He’s double-dealing and getting richer and richer, and more people keep dying. Jesus.”

“Yeah,” Clint muttered and clicked into another tab. “And check out who’s running things over at Stane Industries.”

Justin Hammer. He’d read the reports about Vanko, about Hammer and his weapons, and for once he’d agreed whole-heartedly with Tony: the guy was an asshole. Steve swore, something that he was getting far too comfortable with in this weird, Tony-less reality.

“What about Pepper?” he asked.

Clint shrugged. “She wouldn’t have known Tony before he died.” Clint paused. “That feels so weird to say. Anyway, she only started working for him when he was over thirty.”

“No, I mean, is she okay? He’d… Tony would want us to make sure.”

Clint gave him a weird look, but a few keystrokes later another photo popped up: Pepper, smiling a very fake smile at the camera. 

“Virginia Potts, Executive Assistant to the Managing Director,” Clint read. “That means Hammer. Man, poor Pepper.”

“But she’s okay. Alive, I mean,” Steve said. He felt like he was underwater, trying to figure out which way was up so he could swim to the surface and breathe. 

“Do you think she remembers?”

Steve paused. “I think it’s just us. The Avengers, except Thor. I spoke to… I spoke to someone from SHIELD who had close contact with Tony and he didn’t remember anything.”

Clint’s face screwed up in thought. “Hey, why are we here?”

“I think we’ve established that we don’t know,” Steve tried not to snap. 

Clint gave him a withering look. “No, I mean… in New York. Why isn’t it all blown up? I mean, Tony piggybacked the nuke through the wormhole, so without him we’re either Chernobyl-ed or Loki-d, right? Not that I’m complaining, of course.”

Steve frowned. “You’re right. Hey, google Loki.”

They spent the next hour piecing together a picture of the past few years: what was the same, what was different. No Thor, and no Loki, apparently. 

“Hey, it’s you!”

Steve’s head shot up from examining the mysteries of his coffee pot. “What?”

“Captain America. Turns out you’re still, you know, protecting your fellow man, you’re just doing it solo.”

Steve took a moment to turn that thought around in his head. No team. No Avengers. Just Steve. 

It sounded horrible. 

Clint himself was absolutely nowhere online, something that smacked of SHIELD. “I guess I’m still lone-wolfing,” he said, trying for flippant, but Steve knew him well enough to know that he felt the same as Steve about that. “Explains the digs I woke up in. SHIELD barracks, I’d recognise them anywhere.”

Steve tried to change the subject. “How about Natasha?” 

She was just as much of an online ghost, and they turned to Bruce. 

“They blamed him for Harlem?” Clint yelled, pointing at the screen. “What part of the Abomination did they _miss_ , for crying out loud?”

Steve agreed, flipping through pages of printed out intel. “No wonder he’s still in India. When Natasha checks in, we should let her know. I don’t want him to come back here only to get picked up by the army.”

Clint hummed an agreement. “So what’s the plan, Cap? When we assemble, I mean?”

Steve ducked his head, trying to swallow away the bitter tang of panic that welled up at the question. “First things first, Hawkeye. Gather intelligence. I want to know how we got here. You know how that goes: who gains, who loses from us being here.”

Clint fixed him with an odd look. “Cap, I don’t think _anyone_ gains from this. Except Stane. And Hammer. And they’re both dead in _our_ reality, so how could they send us here?”

Steve ran his hands through his hair. “I don’t know, okay? This is… I don’t know what’s happening. This is almost worse than when I woke up. At least then I had people telling me what happened, giving me briefing packets and updates and files and I didn’t have to _guess_.”

Clint flinched, and before Steve could stop him he sat on the couch beside Steve. “I’m sorry, Cap. I guess I’m just used to having someone tell me what to do.”

Steve scoffed. “Because you always listen, right?”

Clint grinned. “Well, no one’s perfect.”

Steve felt the words welling up before he could swallow them down. “Coulson’s alive. Here. In this reality.”

Clint froze, his face suddenly, terrifyingly neutral. “What?”

Steve could have kicked himself, but all the same, Clint deserved to know. “He answered my phone call, before I called you. I think he’s at SHIELD, wherever that is now.”

Clint sprang to his feet, his hands suddenly in motion, flicking and tapping. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

Steve shrugged. “I just did.”

Clint grabbed his coat and one of Steve’s guns, laid out on the kitchen table like fine china, before storming to the front door. “I’ll be back. I just… I need to see him.”

Steve nodded. “I get it, Clint. Say hi from me.” He didn’t mention that the Coulson on the phone sounded like the last person to exchange casual ‘hello’s with Captain America. He didn’t want to wonder what else Clint would find had changed. 

Natasha checked in that evening, as Steve trawled the internet for mentions of himself. It was even more depressing and unsettling than usual, pictures of lone Captain America saving the day. To Steve’s eye he looked lost, adrift, and he didn’t think it was him projecting onto … well, himself. 

“Rogers.”

“I’m about to board a flight to Kolkata. Anything new?” Natasha’s voice was crisp and capable as always, and Steve wished that he could just ask her to tell him what to do, how to lead, how to get them back where they came from. But that wasn’t what she needed from him, and damn it if Steve was going to let another of them down.

“Banner’s blamed for Harlem here. Bringing him back might be problematic.”

She paused, and he could almost hear the gears in her head turning. “I’ll see if my contacts in India are still applicable. I can get him papers, it’s just a matter of how long it’ll take.”

Steve always knew she and Hawkeye operated in the grey areas of the law sometimes, but still, her casual mention of forging illegal documents made him squirm. “Just… be careful. Take as long as you need. I don’t want General Ross getting his hands on Bruce here anymore than back home.” Clint’s and his research had proved that certain truths were universal. General Ross being a jerk was among them. 

“I will. Is that it?”

Steve bit his lip. “No. Coulson’s alive here. Clint’s gone to see him.”

This pause was longer, and her tone had chilled several degrees when she finally asked, “Are you certain that’s a good idea, Captain?”

He laughed bitterly. “No, I’m not. I didn’t stop him, though. He deserves… well, the least he deserves is a goodbye, if he can get one.”

“Phil won’t be the same, I can almost guarantee it,” she argued. 

“And you think that matters to Hawkeye right now? I’m not saying I think they’ll be the same, I’m saying that if I had the chance, if Peggy were here right now, I’d want to see her. No matter what she was like.”

Natasha huffed out a breath, but she didn’t argue. “Fine. I’ll check in at 0800 New York time tomorrow.”

“Alright. Be safe, Nat.”

Her voice had warmed when she replied, “You, too, Steve.”

\--- 

Around ten the next morning, Steve looked up from his spot on the floor at the sound of his lock rattling, surrounded by the piles of paper he was trying to organise, desperate to find a rhyme or reason to their being there. Clint finally burst in, and Steve could tell he was drunk off his ass by the glare Clint sent the door for daring to bar his way.

“Hawkeye,” he greeted, trying very hard not to sound too judgemental. It wasn’t every day you woke up in an alternate reality to find your dead lover alive.

Clint raised a hand and stumbled to the couch. He fell onto it face first, and Steve sighed. It wasn’t that he’d been expecting the worst, exactly, more that he’d had more than his fair share of strangeness happen to him and, in his experience, it rarely ended in best-case scenarios. 

“He’s married,” Clint said, his voice muffled by the cushion. “He’s married, and it’s not to me.”

Steve winced. “I’m sorry.” He was. He’d read Peggy’s file, and while he was happy that she hadn’t pined her life away for him, he still had an urge to punch something whenever he thought about it.

Clint lifted his head from the couch, a weave pattern indented into his cheek. “I think this is harder,” he rasped, and his face was painfully open, the hurt lay bare for Steve to see. “At home, he’s dead, but I know he loved me. When I – last night, he looked at me like I was an inconvenience. I never knew something could hurt that bad.” His eyes started to well up, and Steve tried to tamp down his panic. He’d never been good with crying people, even when he was a scrawny asthmatic kid comforting Bucky’s sisters over skinned knees. 

But Clint looked so lost, and Steve couldn’t blame him, and here they were stranded in a world even stranger than the one he’d woken up in. So Steve stood and walked to the sofa, and let Clint cuddle up against him while he cried his eyes out, secure in the knowledge that only one of them was sober enough to remember this. 

\--- 

Natasha had checked in that morning as promised, but it wasn’t until her call at 2 PM that they got any kind of news. She had found Bruce, and the two of them were working on returning stateside. 

“But like you said, Cap, the army’s after me. I think I speak for everyone when I say that them getting a hold of me would be bad.”

Steve managed not to growl into the phone. His protective side was raging, thanks to the cried-out unconscious Clint on his couch and the idea of Bruce, meek, kind, unassuming Bruce, locked in a hole somewhere. “It’s not an option, Bruce, don’t worry about it. If anyone can get you past them, it’s Black Widow.”

Steve didn’t hear Bruce’s reply, because suddenly his phone is shrieking, a red light on its screen flashing in time. Clint bolted upright, hand going for the gun Steve relieved him of that morning, and pure terror passed over his face before he focused on Steve. 

“I’ve got to go. Check in at 20:00, Banner, Widow.”

“Sure thing, Cap,” Natasha said. 

Clint’s hangover must have hit him at that moment, because all of a sudden Steve’s phone was being flung at his forehead and swearing lit the air blue. 

“Will you fucking answer that and put me out of my misery?”

Steve rolled his eyes and accepted the call. “Rogers.”

“Captain, there’s a situation brewing in Flushing Meadows,” said Coulson. “You’re required onsite ASAP.” 

Steve watched Clint warily as he started fiddling with Steve’s coffee maker. “Wilco, sir. Quinjet enroute?”

There was a pause. “I’m not quite sure what you’re talking about, Captain, but this is hardly the time for jokes. You and your motorcycle had better make excellent time.”

Coulson hung up on his without a word, leaving Steve kicking himself. 

“What’s the situation?” Clint asked, staring morosely at the carafe as coffee dripped slowly into it.

Steve sighed, feeling bone-tired and angry and frustrated all at once. “I don’t know. I’ve got to go, though. You’ll be okay here?”

Clint shot him a brittle smile. “Right as rain, Cap.”

Steve ignored just how fake that smile and that sentiment was as he changed into his suit and grabbed his shield. 

Now to find the motorcycle Coulson had told him about. 

The Harley, at least, was the same. Steve recognised it the instant he laid eyes on it, locked up in the alley behind his apartment block. There really was no feeling quite like weaving through New York traffic, at speeds a normal man would call reckless but felt almost leisurely to Steve’s enhanced senses. He managed to make the excellent time Coulson had demanded, and by the time he pulled in to a large derelict site in Flushing Meadows he felt more himself than he had since the hangover of two days ago. 

“This the Stark Expo site?” Steve said to Coulson the moment he pulled up. 

Coulson gave him a sharp look, and Steve backtracked. “I visited it, back in ’41.”

Coulson paused, but let it go. “Quite a memory you have there, Captain. This is, indeed, where the Stark Expo was held until the eighties, when Stane discontinued the practice.”

Steve shifted on his feet, trying to pretend that the idea of Stane owning _Tony’s_ company didn’t make him desperately uncomfortable. He’d seen the footage, the man bending over Tony’s pale, shaking body and whispering slick untruths as he tore out Tony’s heart. 

“So what’s the situation?” Steve asked, hiding behind his mission face. 

“We have reason to believe that an inter-dimensional portal is going to open up here in the next hour,” Coulson said, voice flat. 

Steve frowned. “Oh, hey, do you mean the Bifrost?” he asked, dots connecting in his brain. 

Coulson blinked, his face as close to shocked as Steve had ever seen him. “That’s… how do you know about that?”

Steve swore internally, casting about for a believable lie. “Uhh, the Red Skull. Before he died. He said something about journeying between realms, I made a lucky guess.”

Coulson looked like he knew something was up, but professionalism won. Of course. “Very lucky, Captain. It is, in fact, the Bifrost that we believe will open here.”

“How do you know?”

“Dr Foster has worked diligently on predicting Bifrost movements,” Coulson said, gesturing for Steve to walk towards a command tent that had been set up. “A couple of years ago, she was witness to the arrival of a… visitor, for lack of a better word, through the Bifrost.”

Steve had realised that he should play dumb, so he pasted on a blank expression as Coulson pushed his way through scurrying agents into the tent. “A visitor?”

Coulson winced, like just the remembrance of Thor was painful. “An alien, Captain. More powerful than any of us. More powerful than you.”

Steve agreed, but he affected a stern look. “Well, we’ll see about that.”

Coulson smiled, a tiny thing, but it made Steve’s gut kick with grief for a dead man, who had been so much less formal than the one in front of him. He couldn’t imagine how Clint felt, but it was still hard, to see this impersonal Coulson and remember the one who had stumbled over himself in Steve’s presence. 

The tent was full of equipment Steve vaguely recognised as technological, monitors and machines and wires crawling everywhere. It all seemed chunky and ugly to Steve, none of the cool blue lights of Tony’s holograms, all grey plastic boxes and white displays. Technicians in lab coats and tactical gear alike stared at the screens, watching feeds spike and shiver with a vibrating tension that Steve remembered from the SSR tents during the war. 

“So what’s the plan?” Steve asked Coulson, trying to stand somewhere out of the way and just succeeding in bumping into people. Coulson grabbed a briefing packet and shoved it at Steve to read.

“You’re our best bet at containing him, to be honest,” said Coulson, gesturing at Steve’s shield. “That’s vibranium, and we don’t have a single thing that might be able to withstand him except that.”

The packet had nothing Steve didn’t already know about Thor, but he flipped through it dutifully, his mind racing. If Thor didn’t remember him, he probably wouldn’t attack straight out, but he would be only a few ill-chosen words away from it. If he did remember, Steve would have to get him to shut up as quickly as possible. No questions as to which was more difficult. 

Thunder rolled suddenly, and the tent sprung into even more furious motion as alarms sounded and monitors flashed. 

“You’re up, Captain!” Coulson yelled over the noise, and in seconds Steve was in the back of a jeep being driven through sheeting rain towards the centre of the Expo site.

The concrete had cracked over the years, and grass and mud kicked up behind them. Steve tried to keep an eye on the thickly roiling cloud from where Thor was soon to emerge, but the rain stung his eyes and he resorted to huddling miserably under his shield. 

Finally the jeep stopped and Coulson waved him out, handing him a comm. “Try to keep him contained,” he said. 

“For what? You can’t capture him,” Steve replied, and he really didn’t like Coulson’s look at that. 

“We can try,” was all Coulson said before the jeep was careening through the rain back to the command tent. 

Not for the first time Steve wondered just what the hell kind of world he’d woken up in. 

He had barely any time for moping as the flashing whirlwind of the Bifrost opened at his back, knocking him onto his face in the mud. 

“Steven!” a very familiar voice boomed at his back, and soon Thor had grabbed him by his uniform and set him on his feet. “This weather is most inclement. I assure you, it is by no design of mine,” he said with a conspiratorial wink. “But I am surprised to find you alone to greet me. Where are our team mates, our brothers by the bonds formed in battle?”

Steve winced, his mind racing. What he wouldn’t give for Tony at that moment, to send him in to bat for Thor against Coulson and Fury and the Council and the whole goddamn world. 

“Something’s going on, Thor, something bad. Can you trust me? To follow my orders now until I can explain?” Steve asked, trying to _will_ Thor to believe him. 

Thor’s wide smile faded instantly. “You are a worthy leader, Captain, and I will follow you, as I have sworn.”

Steve’s knees wobbled in relief even as he lifted his shield to use as an umbrella over them both. “Okay. First, pretend we’ve never met. Second, be as nice and as non-threatening as you can possibly be. Third, if I tell you to, use Mjolnir and get the hell away as fast as you can.”

Thor nodded, expression grave and weighted with something dark. Steve remembered suddenly that Thor was thousands of years old, and had seen more battles than Steve ever would. “I will do these things. You will explain to me later why they are necessary.” 

It was a statement, not a question, but Steve nodded anyway, his hand bringing the comm online. “Sir, Thor is here, and he is non-hostile. Repeat, no threat.”

Coulson’s voice crackled down the line. “Roger that, Captain. Transport inbound.”

Thor’s eyes widened at the familiar voice, but Steve just shook his head at him. “Yes, sir.”

The jeep that fetched them had two guards standing in the back with huge, unfamiliar guns, and Thor eyed them warily before he took his seat. Steve squeezed in beside him, no easy feat, but he couldn’t imagine taking even the smallest risk that he could be separated from Thor, one of only four other people who remembered the way the world was supposed to work.

Coulson’s face was flat and expressionless when the jeep pulled up. The rain had eased but Steve couldn’t remember feeling this soaked since a memorable occasion near the Seine. 

“Son of Coul,” Thor ventured tentatively, with a glance in Steve’s direction. 

“Mr Blake,” Coulson replied. “Welcome back.”

Thor inclined his head, even dripping managing to look regal. “I bring greetings from Asgard and Odin Allfather. We have repaired the Bifrost with the aid of the Te—” Steve coughed violently and Thor covered with a smoothness that Steve had never imagined him capable of, “—teams of Aesir eager that we might once more extend to the Nine Worlds our protection against those who would rend peace asunder.”

Coulson shifted. “Well that’s… very kind. I’ll leave that for Director Fury to discuss with you. If you’ll come with me?” He gestured to a black town car, waiting with several agents beside it. 

Steve was trying to figure out how to object when Thor flicked his cape, sending droplets flying. “Certainly, Son of Coul. This worthy warrior, the Captain of America, shall accompany us and regale me with tales of his might!” He said it with such finality that when he strolled towards the town car Coulson just rolled his eyes and nodded to Steve. 

“Whatever keeps the alien god happy,” Coulson muttered, and Thor pretended not to hear, just throwing himself into the car with his usual gusto

“A fine steed!” he declared when Steve and Coulson slid in beside him. “Not an equal to Sleipnir, but then he is first among all horses to be found under the boughs of Yggdrasil, and my kin besides. Surely you know the tale of the nine-night ride of Hermodr to ransom for Baldr’s return from death?”

Steve knew a diversion when he saw one, so he ignored Coulson’s icy gaze and said, guileless, “Why, no, I don’t believe I’ve heard that one, Thor.”

Thor would then, of course, not be silent until he had. 

It wasn’t a short tale, and Thor was still somewhere in the midst of Sleipnir and Hermodr’s battles on the road to Hel when they pulled up in front of a non-descript office block in Brooklyn.

“Captain Rogers, we’ll take it from here,” Coulson said, tone flat, but Thor just tugged Steve out of the car behind him and placed a heavy arm about Steve’s shoulders. 

“Nonsense! I have not finished my tale, and the Captain is a Midgardian warrior of renown, is he not?”

Coulson narrowed his eyes but nodded. 

“Then I would have him be present for our negotiations, as a gesture of good faith,” Thor said, and with that started strolling into the building. Steve let himself be pulled along, wheels in his mind turning. 

“Thor,” he muttered, and Thor’s arm tightened around him, “I should get back to Clint, but I’ll be back tomorrow. I’ll explain then. If I’m not here by midday, bust out.” 

Thor paused but he let Steve go. “I will do this,” he said earnestly, and clasped Steve’s arm in a warrior’s handshake. “Give my regards to Barton,” he murmured, too quiet for anyone but Steve and his enhanced ears to hear. 

Steve nodded, and Thor let him go, striding further into the lobby and proclaiming wonder at the chandelier. 

Coulson eyed Steve when he reached the town car again. “You made friends quickly.”

“We’re warriors, sir. We understand each other. I convinced him I’m no good at political stuff, but I’ll come see him tomorrow morning, if that’s okay. We want to keep him happy, right?”

“Right.”

Steve shifted uneasily. Coulson looked like he knew far too much, so Steve pasted on his very best ‘aw shucks’ expression, as Tony called it. “Okay then. Anything else, sir? I’m really wet, and leather chafes something awful,”

Coulson raised an eyebrow. “Debriefing can wait till after your play date tomorrow, I suppose.”

Steve turned on his very best USO grin. “Thanks, sir.”

\--- 

His Harley stood waiting on the kerb when the SHIELD town car dropped him at his apartment, and Steve dithered locking it up. Clint probably didn’t remember the cuddling that they’d done the night before, Clint sobbing into Steve’s neck until he wore himself out and fell asleep. But Steve did. Seventy years had done nothing to change the fact that awkward seemed to be his default setting in interpersonal relationships. He’d face an army alone, with nothing but his shield at his back, but facing another man after a crying jag over his dead lover… it terrified him. 

He gave himself a mental kick-in-the-pants. “Come on, Rogers,” he muttered, striding for the stairs, “Your team needs you. Stop being such a yellow-belly.”

The apartment smelled amazing when he opened the door, and Clint’s head appeared from behind the kitchen counter, hair stuck at all angles. “Oh! I thought you’d be longer.”

Steve shook his head. “Debriefing tomorrow, I’m too soaked to sit through it right now.”

Clint winced. “Wet leather, that sucks, man.”

Steve deposited his shield by the coffee table. “Ain’t that the truth. What are you doing, anyway? What is that smell?”

Clint hopped back and forth on his feet, looking anywhere but at Steve. “Ratatouille and rack of lamb,” he said, opening the fridge and rummaging noisily. “It’ll be ready in an hour.”

Steve knew there was something more to his answer, but the leather really was starting to chafe. “Sounds great. I’m gonna shower.”

“’Kay.”

Steve shook his head and made for his bedroom and the tiny ensuite. Clint must have used it while he was out, the mirror still slightly steamy. Steve started the water and peeled his uniform off. It was noticeably less comfortable than the one he was used to, that their Coulson had helped design. Case in point: it seemed determined not to detach from his inner thighs without taking off a layer of skin, and Steve grit his teeth and yanked. 

He really hated wet leather. 

The hot water beat down on his back and started to ease out some of the tension that he was carrying like a weight around his neck. Two days and they were no closer to knowing where they were, why they were here, how to get home. 

Steve knew he was no good at this. He was a tactician, a soldier. He could look at a battle, at a field of engagement and know within seconds how to approach it, how to win. They were in a battle now, but Steve had no idea how to attack this problem. This was Tony’s thing, this kind of reality-twisting thinking. He’d have had some kind of impossible solution half-done by this point, Steve just knew it.

Their resident genius was out of commission –not dead, he refused to think that, he would not think that in present tense– and their other scientist was occupied trying to get back without getting captured like a rabid animal. Who knew how Clint was coping, if he was compromised. Widow was her competent and terrifying self, but on the other side of the world. Thor was holed up in SHIELD with not-Coulson and Fury and whoever else. Steve’s team was fractured, and he had no idea how to heal the breach. 

He thought back to the last time they’d all been together as a team. That morning in the Tower’s kitchen, all of them hungover and embarrassed and yelling. Tony had stood there, looking confused but unsurprised while they yelled. Guilt welled up in Steve’s chest. Tony hadn’t made Steve down those shots, certainly hadn’t made Natasha get up on stage to sing that terrible song, or made Bruce declare his love for the bartender, or made Clint swap clothes with Natasha and walk around in that lacy bustier. They were grown ups. They were _superheroes_ , for god’s sake, and they’d turned on Tony like vengeful children. 

Steve had never felt more ashamed. He had actually speculated with Natasha what life would be like if Tony—

Steve’s head snapped upright so fast his neck cracked. 

He ran through that last day: Clint’s throwaway remark, Bruce’s dark muttering, his and Natasha’s conversation by the pool…

He was out of the shower and in the living room before he even registered moving. 

“Whoa, Cap!” Clint shrieked, throwing up his hands. “Warn a guy! Or get a towel, Jesus.”

Steve looked down and blushed furiously, but this was more important than modesty. “I know why we’re here. It’s our fault. We did it, we changed things, I don’t know how but we _did this_ , and we have to fix it.”

Clint peeked at Steve through his fingers. “What? How did _we_ do this?”

“We wished for no more Tony, right?” Steve asked bitterly. “We got it. And I don’t know how we’re going to get him back.”

Clint dropped his hands, fixing Steve with a sceptical look. “Okay, Steve, obviously this is a revelation you’ve had, since you didn’t even stop for a _towel_ , but can this wait? You know, until you’re clothed?”

“You don’t understand, Clint, we did this! We wanted it enough that we somehow made a world where Tony was gone. What kind of people do that? What kind of team are we? He’s _dead_ here, Clint! I… just for a second I thought the world would be better off without him and now he’s _dead_. I may as well have killed him!” 

Steve was yelling by the end but he couldn’t stop. His voice felt hoarse and there was something huge and bitter in his throat, choking him with shame and regret, pain stabbing him with every swallow. He’d said those things, _felt_ those horrible, terrible things and for a second, one tiny instant he’d meant them, and now Tony was _dead_ and he’d lost his world for the second time and it was _all his fault_ …

“Hey, hey, Cap, c’mon, breathe for me, you gotta breathe, man.” Clint’s voice broke through to Steve’s brain and he realised he was on his knees on the floor of the apartment –not his, never his, his was the 87th floor of Avenger’s Tower, with a south-facing studio and a gym with super soldier-proof punching bags– and Clint’s hand was rubbing circles on Steve’s back as Steve struggled to breathe through the guilt. 

The world looked smudged; he lifted a hand to his face, and it was wet. Clint seemed to notice that Steve was back to himself and coughed awkwardly. “Welcome back.”

Steve shifted, suddenly desperately conscious that he was _naked_ and _wet_ and had just had a breakdown in front of one of his team. “Uh, sorry. I just—”

“It’s cool, Cap.”

“No, I shouldn’t have – I mean, it just reminded me – I didn’t mean to –”

“Hey, no, I get it, it’d get to anyone.”

Steve swallowed. “Oh. Well. Thanks. I’d better – I’ll go get dressed.”

“Sure, I’ll just finish dinner.”

As he dried himself and dressed, Steve supposed that this made them even now, in a strange kind of way. 

Dinner was stilted and awkward, something that Clint rarely managed to accomplish, but the both of them were too in their heads to bother with conversation. Steve ran over that last day obsessively, his mind torturing him with slow motion close ups of Tony’s face as they all turned on him. Denial, annoyance, but also resignation and what Steve thought was worst: absolutely no surprise. 

Natasha called in a 20:00, with the news that she had obtained false documentation for Bruce, and hair dye for both of them. 

“You’re coming in under your SHIELD identity?” Steve asked, incredulous. Clint, sprawled on the sofa and flipping through more pages of intel, rolled his eyes but didn’t say anything.

“If you think that’s my only working alias, I really worry about you leading this team, Steve,” she said, her tone dripping sarcasm even over the tinny speakerphone and Clint chuckled.

Steve blushed, glad she couldn’t see him. Sometimes her complete and utter _competency_ made him feel like a toddler bumbling about playing at superheroes. Other times, it made his grief for Peggy so sharp it ached. “Right. When are you due in?”

“We’re in transit for twenty six hours, so we’ll be at JFK the day after tomorrow, in the afternoon.”

Steve nodded, running his hand through his hair distractedly. “Good. I – Nat, I think I know why we’re here.”

“About that, we think we figured it out, too.”

Steve frowned. “What?”

“We wished for it, right?” she asked, but went on before he could reply. “Bruce and I have been talking about it. Bruce said something about quarks and temporal rifts, don’t ask me to repeat it, but we think somehow we changed reality.”

“I – yeah, that’s what I think, too.”

“So we can reverse it somehow,” she said, but her tone wasn’t as sure as her words.

“Where’s a genie and a lamp when you need one?” Clint asked. 

Steve agreed, but kept his voice firm as he caught her up to speed on Thor and SHIELD. By the time they’d signed off, Steve felt no better, but there was a kernel of relief in the knowledge that in two short days all his remaining team would be gathered in one place. 

Together, where he could keep them safe, protect them until they could get Tony back.

\--- 

The next morning, Steve went for a run to settle himself. He found himself weaving through neighbourhoods he remembered from his childhood, streets he’d been on with Bucky, and ran across the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan to escape. 

He should have known that would be a mistake. 

Everywhere he ran the absence of Tony haunted him. A donut shop that Tony had dragged him to one morning after an all-night battle, swearing up and down that their bear claws were ‘to die for, Cap, no really, if there was some kind of catastrophe and I had to choose between the life of an innocent or those bear claws, I would be _torn_ , okay?’ 

The glaring hole in the skyline where Tony’s big ugly building should be, jutting up in all its ridiculous phallic glory: ‘what can I say, Cap, I’m compensating, Pepper’ll tell you, inferiority complex like _whoa_. I’m a drivelling heap of sexual insecurity. Why are you laughing?’ 

The little hole-in-the-wall Italian place that they would escape to, when life in the Tower became too fraught or Steve was lost in memories of a world seventy years dead. They’d found it one evening just wandering, and after gorging themselves Tony had offered Steve’s hand in marriage to the chef, ‘because I’m taken and it’s legal here now, right? Just think of the service you’ll be doing the marriage equality movement, Cap, you and Gianni here and your carbohydrate-fuelled love. You’re made for each other, an Italian chef and a man with the appetite of five sumo wrestlers.’ 

The dive bar that Steve had dragged Tony out of too many times to count after Pepper left him, drunk and messy and one time actually kicking and screaming, because ‘who the hell do you are, _Steve_ , Captain fucking Perfect, couldn’t fuck up a relationship if he tried, right?’ 

And the alley a few blocks away, where Tony had finally stopped fighting him and slumped against him instead, not crying but very near to it, slurring into Steve’s chest, ‘I don’t blame her, you know, I’d leave me, too. ‘S not like I didn’t expect it. She deserves so much better ‘n me, Cap. ‘M jussa good brain, really. She needs more than a brain, she needs a whole person.’ Steve had tried to comfort him, but he really was worse than useless with distressed people, and all he’d managed was some awkward mumbling and a hug. 

By the time he was back in front of the apartment building, Steve had run for over an hour and felt more keyed up than when he’d started. 

Clint hadn’t come in yet, having returned to SHIELD the previous night, ‘before they think I’ve defected or whatever’. Steve sped through his shower and within another half hour was on his Harley, weaving through rush-hour traffic. 

The SHIELD building was nondescript, outside and within, in a way that suggested to Steve that it had been on purpose. Beige and grey and shades in between were the only colours he could see, none of the in-your-face _modern_ of the Helicarrier. 

He realised with a start, waiting in a briefing room for Coulson and Thor, that Tony had designed that, too.

“Steven! It pleases me to greet you once more!” Thor declared, slamming open the door with an ominous crack. He strode forward and clasped Steve’s forearm in a warrior’s grip, his grin wide and apparently genuine, if not for the brief flicker of his eyes to Coulson. “I have been engaged in negotiations with the Fury and Son of Coul, and I would have your counsel.”

Coulson coughed. “Captain Rogers is a field agent, Mr Odinson, not—”

“But this is why I seek his wisdom,” countered Thor. “We are, both of us, warriors at the core of our being, and it is from this shared foundation that we may understand each other. Surely the Captain of America has nothing but his people’s best interests in his bosom?”

“Of course,” Coulson said, eyes narrowing.

Thor grinned. “Then he will treat justly. This is my bargain, Son of Coul. Will you accept it?”

Coulson looked like someone had shoved a lemon in his mouth. “Only the World Security Council can authorise Captain Rogers to act on our behalf.”

Thor nodded magnanimously. “This is acceptable to me. While we wait for you to arrange it so, a morning repast! The fruits of Midgardian soil have long been missed by our people, and I would be pleased to relearn their sweetness.”

Steve had never seen Coulson speechless. Silent, yes, circumspect, always, but never at a loss for a reply. Finally he just nodded tightly and spun on his heel, marching out the door. 

“Well, that sure was something,” Steve said.

Thor turned to Steve with a triumphant smile. “You all forget, I think, that I grew up with the Liesmith himself, Loki Silvertongue.”

Steve pulled out a chair and slumped, his nervous energy draining and leaving him wrung out. “I try not to think of Loki if I can help it, to be honest.”

He regretted it the instant the words were out of his mouth. Thor’s face fell and he took a seat beside Steve at the conference table.

“Yes. He has wronged you all sorely. I cannot fault you for your anger, but neither can I share it.”

“Of course not, Thor. He’s your brother. None of us could be angry at you for loving him,” Steve said. 

Thor grimaced, but a contingent of junior agents showed up laden with food and coffee. Thor waited for them to leave before he sent Steve a serious look.

“I think the one you call the Hawk may. And he is justified in it. Loki wronged him more grievously than any of us.”

“Yeah, well, ‘the Hawk’ is kind of a dick, you know.”

Steve’s head jerked up to see Clint leaning in the doorway, arms crossed and a tolerant smile on his face. 

“Are you two actually stupid enough that you’d talk about this in a SHIELD briefing room?” he asked, eyebrows raised. 

Steve flushed. “Oh. I guess I am.”

Thor’s fist clenched. “I, too, was unwary and foolish.”

Clint rolled his eyes. “Well, lucky for you guys this isn’t my first freakshow rodeo. I scrambled the video feed, so we’re good for now.”

“Thanks, Clint,” Steve said, and he meant for more than the surveillance. They hadn’t talked about their respective meltdowns, but Steve couldn’t leave it like that. 

Clint just gave him a small smile and shut the door behind him. “Don’t mention it. Ever. Now, we gonna get the big guy up to speed?”

Steve nodded, and briefed Thor as fast as he could, Clint interjecting in between gorging himself on pastries and coffee. Thor met each bit of information with a serious expression that somehow both suited him and was incredibly strange to see on his face.

“So it is by magic that we were brought to this place,” he stated finally, when Steve had run out of things to tell him.

Clint nodded. “Yeah, but we don’t know how we brought _you_. You weren’t part of the ‘We Hate Stark’ club.”

Steve winced. “Clint.”

“I think I know how that came to be,” Thor said. “Nothing has changed in Asgard as a result of this magic. Loki remains in exile; the Tesseract still rests in its place in the treasure vault of Odin. These things would not be so were Tony not to have battled with us, I think. It follows that this curse is limited to Midgard, and to those not involved in enacting it.”

Steve turned this over and nodded. “That makes sense.”

“So how do we fix it, oh godly one?” Clint asked around a mouthful of – Steve’s heart clenched – bear claw. 

Thor shook his head. “I am no sage. I regret that in my youth I was blind to the value of learning and magic, and I am no better than the meanest pupil in these arts.”

“You’re still more of an expert than anyone else we have,” Steve insisted. 

Thor regarded him with a grave expression. “I know not how such a curse is to be broken. We would do best to consult a master of magic and curses with such a question.”

Steve’s stomach sank even as he asked, “And who might that master be?”

Thor’s smile was infinitely sad. “My brother, of course.”

Clint was off his chair in a second. “Oh, _fuck_ no. Look, Thor, no offence, buddy, I get that you can’t hate your brother, trust me, fucked up fraternal bonds and me are _way_ too familiar for me to get on a high horse about that, but are you fucking _crazy_? You’re talking about the guy who tried to take over the planet with his alien minions on flying jetskis and crazy armoured battle eels a year ago! We can trust _anyone_ more than him.”

Thor met Clint’s furious glare. “He has offered regret, and I believe would welcome an opportunity to make some amends, no matter how small.”

Clint scoffed. “Oh, and the _Liesmith_ couldn’t _possibly_ be yanking your chain, right? Perish the fucking thought!”

Steve agreed. “It’s pretty suspicious, Thor.”

Thor nodded his head sadly. “Very well. There are others in Asgard, sages and worthy teachers who may hold answers to our question.”

Clint growled under his breath but didn’t say anything to that. Steve sighed and rubbed his forehead. A month ago he would have laughed at the idea of getting a stress headache. Now he was sure one was building just behind his eyes. 

“There’s nothing we can do until Bruce and Natasha arrive, anyway. Let’s just… think about this. Clint, can you poke around SHIELD without getting caught?”

Clint rolled his eyes. “Cap. You’re killing me here.”

“Is that a yes?”

“It’s a hell yes, sir.”

“Good. Look around for anything relevant. Check in twice daily, epsilon identification protocol.”

“Wilco, Cap,” Clint said, snapping a salute and leaving the room.

“Thor, you and I will stall Coulson. Any ideas for—”

“I will tell the tale of how I won Mjolnir! It is a very long tale, told properly.” Thor beamed.

“Perfect,” Steve said. “He can’t tell you to stop without risking offending you.” 

Thor chuckled. “You are a more devious man than others give you credit for, Captain.”

Steve smiled. “Hey, I’m a tactician. Sometimes, you gotta fight dirty.”

\---


	2. Inside your mind where the weather is grey

Steve hadn’t been around Coulson very much before he died, but Tony had apparently made Coulson-baiting into some kind of extreme sport. Natasha had said once, when they were all sitting on the balcony watching the sunset over the city they’d saved, that she had never seen Coulson so close to killing someone out of anger as he was to throttling Tony. 

He couldn’t say for sure, but Steve thought that Thor had managed to come pretty close to topping that list. 

“Mr Odinsson, as edifying as this story is—”

“Please, Son of Coul! We around this hallowed table should have bonds close enough to call each other by terms more familiar than that. Call me Thor.”

Coulson’s eye twitched. It had been doing that a lot in the tail end of the past five hours since Thor had begun talking. Steve felt bad for about a second, before Clint’s stricken face came to mind. Then he just refixed his bland ‘well, golly’ expression. Coulson had stopped sending him dark looks after a few of Steve’s blinding USO smiles.

“ _Thor_ , I really think that we should turn the conversation to relations between Earth and Asgard.”

Thor nodded, looking chagrined. “You are indeed wise. I see why it is that the Fury entrusts such negotiations to you. I have been remiss.”

Coulson’s shoulders relaxed slightly, the equivalent of a full body slump in anyone else. “Not at all. But if you would run over the governmental system—”

“Steve! I have been most unfair to dominate our negotiations thus. It is your turn to tell us tales of your valour, that we may share our strengths and our weaknesses. Perhaps you would honour us with a recounting of your transformation, as I have heard from others that it is a tale of sacrifice and a victory that came bittersweet.”

Coulson’s eye twitched again. Steve grinned, a touch too wide. “Gosh, Thor, if you insist.”

“I do. Most effusively.”

“Well okay, then. I was a skinny fellow growing up, you know, and my friend Bucky was going off to join the war…”

\--- 

When Steve returned to the apartment that night. It was to see Clint lying on the couch, arms crossed behind his head, his bow and quiver on the floor.

“Boots off the furniture, Clint, honestly,” Steve huffed, shrugging out of his leather jacket and making for the fridge. “And don’t even think about using the ‘I was raised in a circus’ excuse again. You were in the army, for heaven’s sake, and I know that they can’t have changed so much that they’d let you keep a bunk the way you keep our Tower.”

Clint just grinned. “You are a man of many talents, Cap. I’m ashamed to say I underestimated you.’

“Oh?” Steve asked, rummaging for the orange juice he’d seen that morning, hoping Clint hadn’t polished it off yet. 

“I thought the only person who could get that vein throbbing in Phil’s temple was Stark, but you and Thor made a hell of a go of it. After you left he spent fifteen minutes yelling at Hill. He _never_ yells at Hill. _No one_ yells at Hill.”

Steve ignored the question of how Clint had stayed at SHIELD after he left and still reached the apartment first. With both Clint and Natasha, he had learned that it was best not to question how things were achieved, just to appreciate the results. Steve called it delegating and having faith in his team. Tony called it ensuring plausible deniability. 

“I don’t know what you mean, Clint. We just told stories.” 

Clint lifted his eyebrows. “And you can bullshit with the best. How could I not know this, with Stark around? You could even give him a run for his money.”

Steve hid his smile with a sip of juice, straight from the carton. “That’s a bald faced lie if I ever heard one.”

Clint smiled, wide and proud. “I don’t know, Steve, you managed to spin that anecdote about the USO girls for forty minutes. When I heard you tell it, took three, five tops. That’s impressive.”

Steve rolled his eyes. “I think half of that was Thor interrupting, asking me about their ‘comely forms’. How do you know about that, anyway? Didn’t you have an assignment?”

Clint huffed. “I am an experienced spy, Cap. I can do more than one thing at once.” Steve just looked at him and he sighed. “There wasn’t much to find, to be honest. I pulled all our files, but the only interesting thing in them is Nat’s clearance, which is way lower than it should be. That and Bruce’s framing, which we knew.”

Steve nodded, leaning forward to rest his head on his hands on the bench-top. “Alright. So. We’ve got less than twenty-four hours until Bruce and Widow are here, then we grab Thor and head to Asgard. Anything you think we’ve missed?”

There was a pause, and Steve looked up. “What?”

Clint bit his lip. “Nothing.”

“Clint. What is it?”

Clint dropped his gaze and started fidgeting with the hem of his tee shirt. “Just… I think we should bring him with us.”

Steve blinked. “Who?”

“Phil.”

Oh. _Oh_. “Clint, we can’t—”

“No, hear me out,” he said, sitting up and facing Steve. “This universe only exists because we fucked up, right? So when we go back it’ll revert? If we bring _this_ Phil with us, he’ll be _my_ Phil when we get back.”

His face was serious and earnest and open and heartbreakingly hopeful. “Clint… what if he isn’t?”

Clint’s voice trembled just the slightest fraction when he replied, “It’d be better than no Phil at all.”

Steve opened his mouth to reply but Clint cut him off.

“Steve, _please_. Don’t act like you don’t know how I feel. I was here last night, remember? Imagine if Tony was dead for real, in the real world, and then he was back, but different. Wouldn’t you try to keep him? Do _anything_ to keep him?”

Steve flushed, looked down at the worn Formica of the bench and traced his fingers along its pits and dents. “We’re not – Tony and I aren’t like you and Coulson were, Clint.”

Clint scoffed. “Oh, and all those ‘late night walks’ were just that, right?” Steve stared back blankly and Clint’s jaw dropped. “Oh… oh my god. They _were_. Jesus. He never jumped you?” Steve flushed and shook his head. Clint whistled, eyes wide with wonder. “So when you guys said you were just hanging out – wow. I didn’t think Stark had it in him. I was surprised he was keeping quiet about banging Captain America, but this is…”

“Why do you only ever call him Stark, anyway?” Steve asked, his face burning now.

Clint glared. “Don’t derail me. It doesn’t matter you weren’t together, you’d still do everything I would. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me if you could get him back right now, you wouldn’t do whatever you had to do to keep him.”

“Clint, it’s not that simple.”

Clint crossed his arms. “It’s not that complicated, either.”

Maybe to Clint it wasn’t, but to Steve… the things he felt about Tony was a broiling mess of conflicting emotions and thoughts. Things that he felt guilty about even contemplating, for so many reasons. Most of the time he managed to keep himself fooled into believing that Tony was just his best friend, his team-mate, but then Tony would _look_ at him, eyes dark and laughing, and all the air would go out of the room. He hadn’t felt like that since those last moments with Peggy, adrenaline pumping and the ocean rushing up towards him, terrified and sad and so sure he was right. 

Sometimes he wondered if he was disgracing her memory by the _idea_ of maybe feeling something for Tony. 

He couldn’t possibly say that to Clint, so he sidestepped the question. 

“Alright. Let’s say we take this Coulson with us. Best case scenario he turns into the Coulson we remember. Worst case, he hates us for taking him away from his world. Or he just disappears when the world goes back to normal.”

Clint held his gaze. “I’m fine with those odds.”

Steve sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Let’s shelve this until everyone’s here, alright? Bruce knows more about this than we do. Let’s get all the intel we can before we make a decision.”

Clint sighed and sat up at last, his boots hitting the carpet with a thud as he leaned forward to rest his elbows on his knees. “Fine, Cap,” he said, and his voice was thick and low, “but just so you know, I’ve decided. If he doesn’t come with us, I’ll stay, too.”

Steve’s jaw dropped. “What? But… this universe will be _gone_ , Clint. You’ll be—”

“I know,” Clint interrupted. 

“I thought you said this was worse,” Steve argued. “The other night, you said it’s harder here, where he doesn’t—doesn’t love you anymore.”

Clint rubbed a hand over his face. “It is. But it’s like… I can’t explain it. It’s hurts, but it’s good. At home, it’s just a dull ache, all the time, but here, it burns. It’s like I can _breathe_ again, with him here, alive. I would suffocate if I left him here.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little drastic?” Steve asked, desperate. 

“Steve, I can’t go back to a world without him,” Clint replied, his voice terribly soft. 

“You’d rather _die_?” Steve asked, his voice cracking.

Clint grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “No one ever said I wasn’t melodramatic. I was raised in the circus, you know.”

Steve had opened his mouth to reply when his phone blared. 

“Rogers,” Steve barked, thumbing the speakerphone.

“Steven, I believe that there is a problem,” Thor said, very quietly.

Of course there was. This was _Steve’s life_ , after all. Steve shut his eyes tightly. “What is it?”

“I do not wish to alarm you, but I overheard the one you call Hill and another agent unknown to me discussing the capture of our shield brethren, Bruce Banner and the Black Widow.”

Steve caught his breath. Of all eventualities, that was the furthest from his mind. “Are they there? At SHIELD?”

“No, they were apprehended in a row of heath.” Thor sounded puzzled, and so was Steve. 

“Shit, you mean Heathrow?” Clint asked, jumping up from the couch.

“Indeed, Hawkeye. Does this mean something to you?”

“It’s the airport in London. Fuck,” Clint muttered, pacing up and down. 

“This is very serious news,” Thor said, and Steve resisted the urge to snap at him for stating the obvious. “We must liberate them post-haste.”

“We don’t have a quinjet anymore. How fast can we get to London, Clint?” Steve asked. 

Clint looked pained. “Not fast enough. The council will have them, they’ll be out of the UK into any of a hundred detention facilities within the day.”

Thor coughed delicately. “With the aide of Mjolnir I may be at their side in a matter of hours.”

Steve ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t know where their side _is_.”

“Then I have another suggestion,” Thor said, but he sounded hesitant.

“If the next words out of your mouth in any way include ‘my brother Loki’ I will kick your godly ass,” Clint growled. 

“No, I am not quite so foolish as that. Heimdall, the gatekeeper to the Bifrost, has the gift of sight. If we return to Asgard, he may be able to both locate our fallen comrades and deliver us unto them.”

Steve frowned. “May?”

“There are some few things that are shielded from the gaze of Heimdall. If they are under the thrall of powerful magic, they will be undetectable.”

Steve and Clint shared a look, and Clint shrugged. “Get him to bring Phil and I’m good to go.”

Steve frowned. “Clint—”

“I’m not leaving here without him, Steve.”

“What is that?” Thor asked. 

“We’ll do it,” Steve said, not dropping Clint’s gaze. “Find Coulson, Thor, and bring him with you. We’ll meet you outside SHIELD.”

“Very well, Captain. Until then.”

Steve stalked to get his costume from the bathroom where it had been drying. Really, he didn’t mean to be a whiner, but did _nothing_ about this plan want to go right? They’d lost Tony, no, they’d _gotten rid of_ Tony, and every step of trying to get him back seemed to end up in one screw up after another. 

Steve resisted the urge to put his fist through his shower wall.

He didn’t blame Clint; how could he? Coulson, alive and healthy, wasn’t something he would ever begrudge Clint wanting to hang onto. Jeopardising the mission for it? _That_ he felt he could be a little ticked off about. 

He didn’t know how Natasha and Bruce had been caught. There wasn’t anyone as good as Black Widow when it came to subterfuge, to sneaking and not being seen. 

A sudden terrifying visual of Bruce hulking out on an airplane sprung to his mind and he stumbled in the act of pulling on his uniform pants. 

“Clint, check the web for any mentions of the Hulk,” he bellowed, hopping around the tiny bathroom and tugging ineffectually. He couldn’t _wait_ to get his real uniform back.

“No sign of Bruce’s ‘roid raging inner leprechaun,” Clint called back just as Steve managed to tug on his cowl. 

“Good. Are you ready to go?” he asked, jogging into the living room. 

Clint smirked. “Let’s roll, Cap.”

Hawkeye’s balance was almost as perfect as Steve’s, and they made the trip to SHIELD at breakneck pace. They weren’t coming back here, whichever way things went, and Steve abandoned any semblance of stealth as he popped the Harley up on sidewalks, easily avoiding astonished and furious pedestrians, ran red lights and in general drove like a complete maniac. 

When he finally squealed to a halt outside SHIELD, Clint peeled himself away from Steve’s shield. “You know, if you weren’t all super-soldiered up, I’d have thought you were going to kill us.”

Steve cocked his head, offered Clint the same ‘golly, I don’t know what you mean’ expression he’d been giving Coulson all day, and said, “I thought you liked living dangerously, Hawkeye.”

Clint rolled his eyes as he opened the bike’s panniers and started unloading his gear. “Jesus, you and Tony need to never get in on a prank together.”

Steve’s gut kicked. “Let’s just get him back before you lay down the law.”

“Yes, sir.” Clint nodded, flicked open his bow to check it over with a fluid movement before refolding it and stowing it on his back with the quiver. “How long till we’re out of dodge?”

Steve checked his phone. “Thor should be out with Coulson in a few minutes.”

“Great, I’m gonna take a leak.”

Steve scowled. “Clint.”

“Relax, I’ll stay on comms. Besides, what if they don’t have them in Asgard? Think ahead, Cap.”

“Fine. Hurry.” 

Clint rolled his eyes and jogged inside.

Steve fidgeted. Having Clint and Thor out of his sight made him tense, however irrational it was. He found himself staring at the few pedestrians out on the street, assessing their threat levels subconsciously. 

Then a red-headed woman stepped away from the sidewalk, holding her hand out to flag a cab. 

Steve froze, watching Pepper yell at a taxi that blew past her without stopping. She looked just as put together as she did at home, her hair perfectly done, stylish pantsuit and an understated briefcase. He could see the shadows under her eyes, though, and the nervous tap of her fingers on the briefcase handle. She looked thinner, too, and she had been so tiny to begin with. 

Steve didn’t quite know how to feel. He liked Pepper. She’d been the one to take him to be outfitted for his civilian life, after the battle with the Chitauri and the ensuing chaos that had been the negotiation of Loki’s status. She’d taken him to Macy’s, and with an efficiency and ruthlessness that awed him, had orchestrated the next few blurry hours. When he left, he had been exhausted and overwhelmed, but with a carload of clothing that he liked and wasn’t, apparently, something that her grandfather would wear. 

When he’d asked her why she had helped him, she’d smiled and tilted her head, like she found his question adorable and a little confusing. “Because you needed it.”

They’d become friends after that. Sometimes, when Tony was elbow deep in the guts of some machine and Steve wasn’t busy trying to punch away the grief of losing everything, they’d talked. About art, about politics, anything. She had never made him feel stupid or embarrassed for not understanding something, or not knowing, and he had been grateful. They both loved red wine, and the Impressionists, and baroque music. 

A taxi pulled up and Pepper slid in, and just like that she was gone. Steve couldn’t stop staring at the place she’d been, his mind whirling. 

They’d talked about Tony, too, sometimes. In the beginning, Steve had shared his frustrations with her, and she’d been understanding, correcting him when he was wrong about Tony and sympathising when he wasn’t. Soon, Steve stopped needing her advice, as Tony became his best friend since Bucky, more quickly than Steve would have dreamed possible. Soon, Tony was absent from their discussions entirely, and Steve wondered now if he shouldn’t have guessed then. Should have asked her what was happening, tried to help them. 

Because soon after that, four months after the Chitauri invasion, she’d left Tony. 

Tony had taken it badly, to say the least, but he had barely talked about it. Instead, he disappeared into a bottle or his workshop, sometimes both at once. The closest Steve could get to a straight answer about what had happened, _why_ it had happened, were the drunken rants Tony went on when Steve picked him up from his favourite dive bar. 

Pepper had stopped coming by the Tower for a long time, and returned all his messages with polite but distant responses. The few times Steve had seen her since, it had been as Captain America and Ms Potts, CEO of Stark Industries. Steve and Pepper had barely spent ten minutes in each other’s company in months.

He couldn’t begrudge her or Tony the distance they both needed, but it had hurt, that she had avoided him so completely. Part of him had been happy to have Tony’s attention all to himself, but that part he squashed ruthlessly. Another part of him was furious at her, for being the reason he had to all but pour Tony into bed so many times. 

His shame redoubled at that thought. Pepper might have ended her and Tony’s romantic relationship, but she was still his closest friend, and she shepherded Tony’s company with all the care and devotion that someone else might lavish on a child. Tony and she had begun to slowly relearn how to be in each other’s company, and Tony had only last week cracked a joke about setting her up with Happy. A real joke, too, not a brittle, thinly veiled self directed insult. No matter what had happened between them, she had never let Tony down. 

Not like Steve had.

How could Steve be angry at her, when it was _him_ who had landed them all here? Him and his team, ungrateful and spiteful to a man, except Tony, who wouldn’t know how to leave a man behind if he tried. Unless it was him, of course. 

Steve swore then and there that Tony would never find out _how_ they’d changed the world. If he had to lie through his teeth to SHIELD, blackmail or threaten or cajole his team, beg the Asgardians… no matter what, he’d keep it a secret. He kept seeing Tony’s face in his mind, at that instant when they’d turned on him, and that was an expression he wanted to never, ever see it again.

“Whoa, Cap, you look like someone just shot your puppy.”

Steve blinked and shook himself.

Clint eyed him worriedly. “Everything okay, Cap?”

“Yes, fine. I just – I’m fine.”

Clint looked like he was about to argue, but Thor’s booming voice interrupted them, even from inside the SHIELD building. 

“No, indeed, Son of Coul. It is a longstanding tradition among my people that a bargain be settled ‘neath the stars!”

Clint shook his head. “Seriously, you and him? Bullshit _masters_. I’m a little scared, to be honest.”

Steve didn’t reply, just watched the doorway. Soon enough, Thor strode through it, towing an exasperated looking Coulson. Steve whistled, and Thor spun on his heel to walk towards them. 

Coulson frowned. “Captain? Hawkeye? What are you two doing here?” His eyes narrowed. “How do you even know each other?”

Everyone ignored him. Thor kept an iron grip on Coulson’s arm when he started to pull away. 

“Everything is in readiness?” Thor asked in an undertone. 

Steve nodded. “We’re ready. How do we do this?”

“Captain Rogers, explain yourself _now_ ,” Coulson snapped.

“It is a simple process. Just ready yourself, as best you can,” Thor said, raising Mjolnir in his free hand. “Heimdall! Open the Bifrost for myself and these three mortals. We return to Asgard!”

“Agent Barton, Captain Rogers, this is an act of sedition against SHIELD, against your country, against your _planet_. What the hell are you doing?” Coulson asked, struggling properly now. Thor didn’t budge. 

Clint looked away, his jaw working, and Steve smiled apologetically. “Sorry, sir. You’re not collateral, we promise.”

Coulson’s lips thinned. “Oh, how reassuring.”

Steve was about to respond when something roared open above them and the world faded out into colour.

The Bifrost wrapped around them in a whirl of light and deafening sound, and Steve felt like he was falling into a void and plummeting upwards towards infinity all at once. 

“ _Is this punishment for the time I made you ride the Cyclone at Coney Island?_ ”

Steve clenched his eyes shut and tried to fight away nausea and soul-deep pain as Bucky’s screaming face fell away from him again and again in his mind’s eye. 

He couldn’t have said how long the trip lasted. An age, an instant, both and neither, and suddenly he was standing on his feet inside a golden dome. An enormous man in gleaming armour glared down at them, his eyes like glowing coal embers beneath his wide horned helm. Steve settled into a defensive stance instinctively. He was _enormous_ , larger even than Thor, and Steve didn’t like the idea of taking him on.

“Heimdall!” Thor boomed, striding forward to clap the man’s shoulder. “Well met, my old friend. Let me introduce my companions! This is Steven Rogers, the Captain of America.”

Steve forced himself to relax and nodded, trying not to tense again when Heimdall looked at him with his burning, infinite red eyes. “Sir. Thanks for the ride.”

Heimdall inclined his head graciously. “My prince commands and I obey.” His voice was deep and ancient, like the voice of primeval bedrock, and Steve could feel it echoing in his bones.

Thor grinned like this was a joke. “This is Clint, he of the hawk’s eyes, and Phil, Son of Coul.”

Heimdall slid his depthless gaze off Steve towards the others. Coulson looked tense enough to fairly explode out of his skin, and Clint kept glancing at him worriedly.

“I bid you welcome to Asgard,” Heimdall said. “But you are not here to stay, I think.”

Thor’s expression sobered. “Indeed. Our shield brethren have been captured, and we know not where they are being held. Your sight is without equal, Heimdall. Will you help us?”

“As you say,” Heidall replied, “I shall aid you.”

Thor looked to Steve then, and Steve coughed awkwardly. “Heimdall, sir, can you see them?”

Heimdall blinked, a slow and deliberate movement. “The ones you call Natasha Romanov and Bruce Banner are underground, beneath London.” 

Clint swore. “The SHIELD detention facility. That place is a goddamn fortress.”

Steve frowned. “Can you put us inside, Heimdall?”

Heimdall shook his head slowly, the helm’s horns sweeping the air. “The Bifrost cannot deliver you to them below the surface. You must free them from the outside.”

Steve opened his mouth to thank him when Coulson strode forward. 

“Alright, I have been patient, but someone better explain to me right this second what Bruce Banner and Agent Romanov have to do with—”

“The Avengers Initiative, Phil,” Clint said quietly. “Do you know what that is?”

Phil’s head turned so fast Steve thought he would pull something. “How the hell did _you_ hear that term, Barton?”

“You’ve heard of it?” Steve asked. As he understood it, their Coulson had created the Initiative as a response to Iron Man. The bitter, angry Coulson standing in front of them didn’t seem like a man to believe in heroes. Certainly not enough to bet the world’s safety on a team of too-large egos and not enough discipline, Iron Man or no.

Coulson glared at him. “I proposed it, when we pulled you out. Fury shut it down before we even got past preliminaries.”

Steve’s jaw dropped. “But… you don’t like me.”

Coulson rolled his eyes. “I don’t have an opinion about you one way or the other, really, Captain. The threat-response capabilities of a team of uniquely powered individuals make it the logical tactical choice over individual deployment. Especially in response to the kinds of threats we’ve been seeing recently.” Coulson shifted his glare to Thor, and Steve wondered what he’d say if he knew about the Chitauri invasion.

Clint looked like he was either going to cry or hit something, staring at Coulson’s back. Coulson chose that moment to whirl and glare at him. “Was it you, Agent Barton? Did you steal this information out of my office?”

Clint bristled, hurt shifting to indignation in the flash Steve had only ever seen in fights between couples or close friends, between people who knew where to aim to hurt. It gave him a jealous pang, absurdly. “Yeah, because that makes sense,” Clint drawled, crossing his arms.

Coulson’s jaw twitched. “You’ve been acting suspiciously for days now. Going AWOL, sneaking around headquarters, Agent Sitwell said he saw you crawling out of a _vent_ , for god’s sake. Does this have anything to do with the other evening?”

Clint’s expression hardened instantly. “Sir, no sir. That would be _unprofessional_ , right?”

“Don’t you throw that back at me right now, Barton,” Coulson growled. “You made your choice, years ago.”

Clint’s mouth clicked shut and his eyebrows shot up. “Wait, what?”

“Don’t pretend you don’t know what I mean. Rejection I handled. This… this _taunting_ is beyond cruel, even for you,” Coulson snapped.

“I… I thought you were married,” Clint blurted.

Coulson’s mouth thinned into a hard line, fists tightly clenched beside him. “I don’t know if you’ve suddenly changed your mind or got it into your head that I’ve been waiting around, because you know goddamn well I haven’t. But for you to make a dig about my divorce right now is just beyond the pale.”

Steve gaped, frozen to the spot. Clint had gone pale like he might be sick, Coulson looking like he was one comment away from decking him. Thor had a puzzled frown on his face and Heimdall had the same intent but abstract expression he had since they arrived. 

Steve shook himself mentally. Bruce and Natasha were being held, and they were depending on what was left of their team to get them out. 

“Coulson, stand down. Clint, you too. That’s an order, Avenger,” he barked, putting his Howling Commandoes voice to use. Clint glared at him but slunk over to the wall of the chamber, fiddling with his retracted bow. 

Steve faced Coulson, trying to project authority. “Agent, you need to understand a few things. First, we’re not the people you remember. We’re from an… alternate dimension.” He thought that was what Bruce had called it. Coulson blinked. “We don’t remember anything about this place before three days ago.”

Coulson’s face had gone blank, so Steve continued. “Where we come from, we’re the Avengers. Me, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Banner, Thor and Iron Man.”

Coulson lifted an eyebrow. “Leaving aside the issue that no sane person would be on a team with the Hulk, who is Iron Man?”

Steve flinched. “Irrelevant; he’s out of play right now. We’re trying to get him back. But first, we need to free Natasha and Bruce.”

“Assuming I believe you, Captain,” Coulson replied, and his voice and expression telegraphed that he definitely didn’t, “If this gentlemen’s intelligence is correct, and they are in the London detention facility, extraction will be almost impossible. It’s the one place we have that is considered Hulk proof.” 

Steve had thought it would be, and his mind raced ahead, thinking up and discarding plans and running scenarios with a speed of thought that the serum hadn’t needed to give him. “That’s why we need you to help us.”

Coulson coughed. “Now why would I do that?”

And here Steve knew he had to play his hand, call Coulson’s bluff, and pray desperately that the world couldn’t change enough for this to fail. “Because, sir, at the end of the day, you still believe in heroes.”

Clint spun around at that, and even Thor looked wary. 

“Why did you design the Avengers Initiative?” Steve pressed, taking a step forward. “It can’t just be threat response. You have a host of highly trained agents designed to work cohesively in units of any size. So why propose a team? Why can you barely hide your disdain whenever you look at me? What makes you dislike Banner so much?”

Thor still looked puzzled, but out of the corner of his eye Steve could see Clint’s face go slack in understanding. 

“Is it because we disappointed you?” Steve asked, taking another step. Coulson’s face was the careful bland mask that Steve remembered seeing him wear in the Helicarrier, but Steve thought he could see tension around his mouth. 

“We’re superheroes. You grew up reading about people like us. You grew up reading about _me_. And when I woke up, something happened. I mean, I don’t remember it, and it wasn’t me. But the other Cap… the other _Steve_ , he did something. Something that disappointed you badly, and Clint was a bastard to you, god alone knows where Natasha was, and here there was no Tony to convince Bruce that he _could_ be a hero, so you were left with the ragged pieces of a dream and no one to sign your trading cards.”

Steve stopped, breathing a little hard. Coulson had gone ash white. 

“I’m right, aren’t I?” Steve asked, his voice gentle. 

Coulson swallowed, but didn’t say anything. Steve went for the kill, plastering on his most sincere expression, the one Tony called his Boy Scout face.

“I’m telling you now, Coulson… _Phil_ … you were right. Where we come from, the Avengers are Earth’s mightiest heroes, and we saved the world. And we did it because of you.”

Coulson turned away, but Steve followed him, reaching out to grab his shoulder and spinning him back to look up at Steve’s face. 

“Phil. Help us save our team mates, and then help us save the world, and come back with us, to where _everyone_ believes in heroes.”

Steve held his breath, praying that it would work, that he’d been right, that he’d read the whole situation accurately, and then Coulson nodded, just once, sharply.

“Okay, Captain. I’ll believe you, for now. You better hope you’re right, because if this goes badly and SHIELD catches up with us, you’re going to wish they’d left you frozen in the ocean.”

Steve smiled wanly and nodded, knees weak with relief. He honestly hadn’t had a workable plan if Coulson had said no, and Bruce and Natasha were depending on them. 

Not to mention Tony. 

Thor walked forward, as close to hesitant as Steve had ever seen him. “Son of Coul, I am glad to see you alive once more,” he said, offering Coulson his hand. Steve winced, but Coulson just gave him a dark look. 

“I take it that this world saving that you mentioned happened after my alternate self died?” he remarked lightly, grasping Thor’s hand. 

Steve ducked his head. “You gave us something to avenge.”

Coulson looked thoughtful at that. “Well. I guess I must have meant something to you, for that to work.” He seemed to realise something then, and turned to look at Clint, who was intently examining the gold dome. 

“Hawkeye,” he began, but Steve touched his shoulder. They didn’t have time. 

“Coulson, do you have clearance for the London detention center?”

Coulson raised an eyebrow, his sarcastic expression a flash of the man Steve had known so briefly. “Of course. I have clearance for everywhere.”

Steve nodded. “So you can check them out, right?”

Coulson’s eyes narrowed. “Theoretically.”

“We just need to get them to the surface for the Bifrost to work, right, Thor?” Steve asked. 

“Indeed, Steven,” Thor replied. 

Clint broke off his study of the dome and stalked over. “How the hell are you going to convince SHIELD that a Ren Faire escapee, Captain Anachronism, me, and Phil are enough to contain not only Black Widow but the goddamn _Hulk_?”

Coulson smiled thinly. “Never underestimate the willingness of others to believe the impossible, Barton. Especially from a superior officer.”

Clint looked sceptical.

“Look, all we have to do is get them past the Hulk-proof floors,” Steve said, looking to Coulson for confirmation, who nodded. “Then we can fight our way out, if we need to.”

Clint raised an eyebrow. “That’s your plan, master tactician? Fight out of a friendly base?”

Steve felt the tension that had been riding him for days just snap, and he all but greyed-out with rage and frustration and grief and shame. 

“I don’t know, alright! All I know is that this is the second time I’ve woken up somewhere I don’t understand, and I hate this, and I hate that I made it happen, that we _all_ made it happen. I miss Natasha, I miss Bruce, and I – god – I miss Tony. He’s dead and it’s my fault and I know you know what that’s like. All I can think of is Tony’s _face_ if he were to find out what I did and I feel like I can’t breathe because I can’t imagine how I would have survived without him this past year and all I want is to _tell him that_.”

He pulled himself up, panting, his hands flexing so hard on his shield that his knuckles ached. Thor drew close and placed a heavy palm on Steve’s shoulder. 

“Fear not, Steven. We will get our brother of iron back.”

Coulson was eyeing them all in turn, Clint speculatively, Thor warily and Steve with outright curiosity, but Clint avoided his gaze. “Sorry, Cap,” he said, fiddling with his bow. “You’re right. We need to fix this. Let’s go get Tasha and Bruce.”

Steve drew in a shuddering breath. “Any suggestions, sir?” he asked Coulson, who shrugged. 

“To be honest, your plan should work fine.”

Steve squared his shoulders and pulled his cowl over his head. “All right, Avengers. Assemble.”

Thor nodded at Heimdall, and the world faded out into the chaotic whirl of the Bifrost again. 

They landed with the same gut-churning suddenness, and Steve looked around. They were standing on a footpath outside another nondescript office building like the SHIELD headquarters in Brooklyn. The sky was tinted gold in the east, the light grey with the chill of early morning. 

Thor brandished Mjolnir defensively and Clint flicked out his bow to its full size. Coulson just calmly reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an ID. 

“Put those down, please, and follow me,” he said, already striding for the door. 

Coulson’s ID turned every lock green, and the night shift snapped to attention whenever they saw him, their bored and sleepy expressions vanishing.

Finally they reached the elevator for the underground detention facility, and Coulson gave them a warning look. “Just follow my lead,” he muttered as they piled in. With Steve and Thor it was a squeeze, and the back of Clint’s neck reddened when he had to press up against Coulson. 

Coulson’s earlier loss of control seemed a thing of the past, the cool professionalism back in place. They all stepped out of the elevator and into a grey, utterly featureless room, a pair of guards in SHIELD uniforms behind a desk opposite the elevator.

“Agent Coulson,” one said, nodding respectfully. 

“Agent Koffman.” Coulson nodded back and handed over his ID. “Prisoner transfer, Banner and Romanoff. Fury sent me to deal with it personally.”

Koffman’s eyebrows shot up as his partner scanned Coulson’s ID and started tapping away at his keyboard. “Really? Thought the transfer team would be… bigger.”

Coulson smiled. “These men have special skills,” he replied smoothly. “Trust me, we can handle Banner and the Widow.”

Koffman nodded. “Yes, sir.”

His partner looked up from the computer. “Retrieving the prisoners now, sir. ETA five minutes.”

Coulson smiled. “Thank you, Agent Harkness.” 

The next five minutes were some of the most nerve-wracking of Steve’s life, waiting on tenterhooks for Bruce and Natasha. When a door finally opened at the side of the room and a dishevelled Bruce shuffled through, Steve felt relief and horror flood through him. 

Bruce was bound, hand and foot, with enormous cuffs that Steve guessed were supposed to contain him even if he were to transform into his less-friendly alter ego. One guard held a gun trained on his head, another held the chain linking his cuffs, and yet another held a metal pole aloft, the end attached to a wire snare around Bruce’s neck. 

Bruce met Steve’s gaze and Steve saw pure, miserable relief in his face.

Steve’s fists clenched and he heard his knuckles pop.

“Sign here,” Harkness said, and Coulson signed, looking supremely bored. 

The four guards around Bruce looked like nothing would relieve them more than handing him over, but Steve couldn’t take Bruce anywhere like that. 

“Take that thing off him,” he growled, ignoring the look Clint shot him, the ‘we’re trying to be _subtle_ , here, Cap’ look.

The guards glanced to Coulson, who nodded. “We don’t need it.” The guards exchanged nervous looks, but slipped the snare off Bruce’s neck. 

Thor stepped forward to take the chain at Steve’s jerk of his chin. 

“Romanov?” Coulson asked. 

“She’s coming. Apparently they had to sedate her earlier, so she’s a little slow-moving,” Harkness replied, fingers flying over the keyboard.

Steve swore internally. If they had to fight their way out, an incapacitated Widow was a definite problem. 

Finally, the door slid open again and Natasha stumbled out. Her face was swollen and bruised, but her puffy eyes widened when she caught sight of Coulson. 

Steve willed her not to say anything, to stay silent, to resist asking the question even if she was drugged. 

Clint stepped forward to take her arm, and her guards returned through the door with Bruce’s. 

“They’re all yours, sir,” Koffman said with a sympathetic smile, and then they were all stuffed into the elevator, even more squished than before. 

Natasha started to mumble something but Clint just squeezed her arm and she was silent. Steve’s pulse thundered in his ears, adrenaline screaming through his system as the elevator rose through the levels of the detention centre. It was slow, so slow, surely too slow? 

But then the door opened with a ping, and they were at ground level again, and they were marching quickly – _not too quickly, stay calm, look natural_ – through the building, and there was the door and the slowly brightening sky. 

Steve let out his breath, but then a claxon sounded with a noise like the end of the world. Agents poured out of offices at every side and Steve yelled, telling the others to run, _run_ , and his shield knocked back the bullets as they ripped through the air. 

Thor smashed the glass door and they ran through the falling glass, and the second they were all on the pavement Thor shouted for Heimdall. 

Steve felt the Bifrost grab hold of him the instant the gun shot rang out and he saw Clint fall backwards, red mist fine and hazy in the morning air.

Steve was still yelling his name when they landed in Asgard.

Clint fell to the floor with a groan. Steve shoved away a stunned Bruce and doped Natasha standing in his way to get to Clint’s side. He was curled around his belly like a child, and Steve fell to his knees beside him. 

“Clint?” he asked, pulling at his shoulder until Clint unfolded, his hands pressing down in the wound in his gut. Steve pushed them away to replace them with his own.. He had super strength. He could keep the blood in Clint’s body, keep him alive, not lose him like he’d lost so many others. Bucky’s face lingered in his mind’s eye, superimposing itself over Clint’s, and Steve had to bite down on his panic.

“You idiot, I saw you move. You ran _into_ the killzone,” Steve muttered. 

Clint smiled, but there was blood in his teeth. “They were aiming for Phil. Couldn’t let that happen again, Cap.” 

Steve grimaced and looked up, taking stock of their surrounds. Heimdall watched them with the same grave and distant expression, and Steve wondered if he was even seeing them at all. Thor had disappeared, flying out of the dome behind his hammer, and Steve hoped to God he was bringing whatever version of medic they had in Asgard. Coulson knelt on Clint’s other side, his face an unreadable mask. Bruce had collapsed onto the steps, cradling his head in shaking hands, Natasha trying to clumsily comfort him and mostly just slurring her words and petting him with fumbling touches. It was the least graceful Steve had ever seen her, and it was strangely endearing. 

“So, Agent Barton. It seems that we were talking at cross-purposes earlier,” Coulson said, taking off his jacket and balling it up. He lifted Clint’s head gently, sliding the jacket underneath.

Clint chuckled, and to Steve it sounded horrible. “You could say that, sir.”

“How about you explain what we were to each other in your world,” Coulson suggested, and Steve recognised it for what it was. Keep him talking, keep him conscious. 

“Well, sir, we were fucking.” Clint laughed again, like it was funny, but the smile on his face was pained. “It was a secret, though. Regulations, you know. But it had been a while, and we were going to come clean about it soon. Then you died.”

“I see.”

Clint clenched his teeth and tensed, breathing fast through his nose, and Steve had to hold him down to stop any more blood escaping. 

“It was my fault, you know,” Clint continued when the spasm ended, voice soft and agonised. “I got him onto the helicarrier, and I wasn’t there when he stabbed you, too busy getting my brains fixed by Tasha’s boot.”

Coulson nodded like this made perfect sense, when Steve knew it had to be gibberish to him. “How did you cope with my death, Barton?”

Clint grinned again, but it was more like a baring of teeth. “Fucking terribly, sir. All sorts of self-destructive methods. Tried fucking around, but it didn’t take, couldn’t even get it up. So I spent my nights in the range, or the gym, or just running when I got locked out of those. No drinking, but I sure as shit tried to get myself killed a lot this past year. Don’t think I’ve ever jumped off that many buildings.”

Steve scowled, but didn’t interrupt. 

“I wouldn’t have wanted that, Barton,” Coulson said softly.

Clint scoffed, and winced. “Yeah, well, you were dead, right? Didn’t matter what you wanted. Tasha threatened to kill me herself if I didn’t quit being a dumbass, of course.” Clint smiled fondly before he managed to focus on Coulson’s face. His expression went slack in wonder, and Steve’s chest ached a little. “But it feels like I didn’t take a breath the whole year, until I saw you the other day in your office.”

“And I yelled at you,” Coulson said. 

Clint smiled. “Yeah. Just like old times.”

There was something in Coulson’s smile at that that made Steve take in his breath. It was soft, lingering, remembering.

Remembering. 

“Agent Coulson?” he asked. 

Coulson never looked up from Clint’s face, but Steve knew, even before he said a thing.

“Hello, Captain. It’s been a while.”

Steve didn’t get a chance to process that, because Thor rushed in with the Asgardian equivalent of paramedics, and the next twenty minutes ran together in a blur of flurried movement. Clint had been given the Asgardian version of abdominal surgery to remove the bullet, and he and Natasha were conked out in connected rooms, attended by healers. 

“I assure you, Captain, Asgard is without equal in the healing arts,” Thor said quietly, his hand squeezing Steve’s shoulder as he steered Steve out of Clint’s room. Steve sighed and scrubbed at his face, trying to _will_ himself to calm down. 

“I know, Thor. I’m just…” 

Thor smiled. “I understand, Steven. But for the moment, there is naught to be done for them save what is already being done. Come. Break bread with me. The Son of Coul and our comrade Bruce are waiting.”

Steve shook his head and tried to put aside the image of Clint, pale and face wracked in pain, an Asgardian healer wrist deep in his gut, magic glowing blue about her face.

“Alright, let’s go.”

Thor lifted an eyebrow. “Do you perhaps wish to… freshen up?” he asked, looking pointedly at Steve’s hands. They were stained with Clint’s blood, along with the front of his uniform, the silver star flecked red.

Steve coughed. “That would probably be for the best.”

Thor gestured to a door across from Clint and Natasha’s. “You will find clothing and washing necessities in here. My manservant will show you to the terrace when you are ready.”

Steve blinked at ‘manservant’ but the idea of hot water and soap was suddenly irresistible. Thor left with another knowing smile. 

Steve made straight for the deep tub at the side of the huge room, turning and twisting the levers until hot water began pouring out of an enormous brass faucet in the shape of a stag’s head. 

The ceiling was hung with golden and red drapes of crushed velvet and shot silk, the bed piled high with thick pelts. A bear’s jaw was frozen mid-roar on the floor, its hide still glossy. It was opulent like nothing he’d ever seen, and it made him miss Tony more than ever. Tony would have _loved_ this room, for all that he’d complain it wasn’t modern enough. _They even decorated with my colours, Cap. Considerate for aliens. I guess wi-fi would be asking too much, though, right?_

Steve shook his head and took off his costume. He was being maudlin again. He couldn’t afford it. Clint and Natasha were injured, but being cared for. Bruce was another matter. Steve was almost positive that SHIELD hadn’t hurt him, the simple truth being that they would have been too afraid of his reaction, Hulk-proof cells or not. Still, Bruce’s expression when he’d seen Steve, and the shaking wreck that he’d been on the steps of Heimdall’s observatory while Steve’s attention had been taken by Clint told him that Bruce most definitely wasn’t unscathed. 

He drew the water for his bath, making it deep and hot, and waited for it to fill. He puzzled over the pots and jars beside the tub before selecting the one that smelled the least suspicious. The foam had been tinged pink by the time he was washed, but he felt calm and focused again. Steve wasn’t an idiot. He hadn’t been picked to lead the Avengers because he was the strongest, or the fastest, or the cleverest. He’d been chosen because he knew people, and he cared, and he knew when to push or leave it alone. It was what gave him his tactical skill. He knew what people could give, and what they couldn’t take. 

Most people, anyway. Tony was an exception.

Towelling himself off, he investigated the clothing lying on the bed. To his relief, it wasn’t anything complicated or outlandish, a pair of trousers and a shirt of the same soft but thick material. Steve pulled on his own boots after them, ignoring how stupid he felt in light green clothes with bright red boots. _You look like a Christmas tree, Cap._

Thor’s manservant—honestly, Steve’s life was so odd sometimes—stood waiting outside his door, and led him to a bright, airy terrace. Thor, Coulson and Bruce sat at a table fairly groaning with food, platters of fruit and bread and cheese and… was that a _boar_?

“Steve!” Bruce said, standing so quick his chair fell backwards. 

Steve met him halfway to the door, but Bruce pulled up with a start and began to fiddle with his hem, shuffling awkwardly. Steve heard the phantom Tony in his head scoff. _Honestly, Cap, give the guy a hug, will you? I promise you won’t get cooties. Wait, did they have cooties in the forties? Here, quick, I’ll give you a cootie shot._

Steve moved slowly, so Bruce would see it coming, and enfolded the other man in a tight hug. “I’m so glad we got you back, Bruce.”

Bruce stood rigid in Steve’s arms for a long moment, before he reached up to tentatively pat Steve’s back. “Thanks for coming, Steve,” he said. 

Steve smiled and pulled away. He took Bruce’s shoulders in his hands and met his gaze. “You’re on my team. And you’re my friend. I’ll always come, you got that?”

Bruce smiled, and if it still looked hunted then Steve wasn’t going to call him on it. Not after the last few days. 

“Bruce was regaling us of his and the fearsome Widow’s adventures in Kolkata!” Thor boomed from the table through a mouthful of bread. Coulson rolled his eyes and sipped his drink primly.

Steve took a seat, eyeing the roasted animals with suspicion. He’d stick to cheese and fruit. “Yeah, tell me.”

Bruce shrugged and took a sip of something steaming. “Really, it’s not very exciting. I stayed in most of the time, and Nat would run out to meet her contacts, get the stuff we needed, all that. I mostly tried to figure out how the hell we got here.”

“How did they catch you?” Steve asked. 

Bruce sighed. “They picked us up right off the plane. Nat tried to talk us out, then she tried to _fight_ us out, but they must have expected her, because they drugged her pretty quick. She took about ten out first, though,” he added, a smirk playing around his lips. 

Steve smiled. Watching Natasha pummel guys three times her size was always a fun time. “How’d they know it was you?”

“Probably facial recognition,” Bruce guessed. “Going by plane was always a long-shot, to be honest. We should have aborted when Thor showed up, but…” He shrugged again. 

“You did the right thing,” Steve said. “It was my call. I should have thought about the facial recognition, or asked Thor about the Bifrost option. You followed my orders, Bruce. I’m the one who should apologise to you.”

Bruce frowned. “Steve.”

Steve lifted a hand. “No, really. I’m sorry you had to go through that, Bruce.”

Bruce quirked a little smile. “Cap, that barely scores a blip on my ‘bad weekend’ radar.”

Steve gave him a smile back. “Nevertheless. I’m sorry, Bruce.”

“I know, Steve,” Bruce said, and an awkward silence fell. 

“Son of Coul, you have yet to share the story of your own recovery,” Thor finally said around a mouthful of meat. 

Coulson shrugged, looking uncomfortable, his fingers tensing on his cup. “It’s strange. I remember both… lives, I guess you would call them. They’re both real. They sit side-by-side in my head. I remember my wife, I remember leaving her, and I remember getting stabbed in the kidney by Loki that same day. How’s that for a cosmic middle finger?” he tried to joke. 

Thor looked stricken. “I must apologise. It must be difficult for you to be here, in the realm of your killer.”

Coulson raised an eyebrow. “Thor. I’m a SHIELD agent. I assure you, I’ve been in worse situations.”

Thor looked down at his plate and fiddled with a horn of mead. He looked miserable. Steve hadn’t really thought about it, about how difficult it must be to reconcile your team-mates’ hatred, justified hatred no less, of a brother you loved. Could he have worked with a team that hated Bucky? 

He couldn’t imagine it, and put the thought aside. There was a question that he needed answered. “Where is he, Thor?”

Thor frowned. “He has been interred upon the Isle of Silence, where he may neither practise his magic nor wield the silver tongue for which he is famed. It is, perhaps, the one place which will hold him.”

“So there’s no way he could have done this, then? The whole reality… thing?” Steve asked.

Thor shook his head. “My brother’s magic works in ways I do not understand, but I do know that words are the yarn with which he waves. While they cannot be spoken, he has neither warp nor weft.”

Steve shared a blank look with Bruce. “Well, okay then,” he said. He had no choice but to believe Thor, and trust that the Asgardians wanted him locked up as much as the Avengers and SHIELD did. “There are other sorcerers here though, right?”

Thor smiled faintly. “All in Asgard know some little magic, but the greatest of our scholars are my mother and father, who tended Yggdrasil to blossom and branch in the time long before my birth.”

One day, Steve would understand it when other people talked. One day. 

Not today, however. 

“They tended a plant,” Steve repeated, his brow creasing in the familiar way that it always did when he could understand the words but not how they fit into the conversation. _Do you two… fondue?_

“He means they built the Bifrost,” Bruce interjected, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. He had the glazed expression that Steve was learning to recognise. Bruce and Tony both looked like that when they were sunk inside their own minds, puzzling out problems and thinking so fast Steve couldn’t imagine ever keeping up. 

“Indeed,” Thor confirmed. “It was through the craft of Heimdall that it was remade, but the first bridge between worlds was the work of my parents.”

“Not teams of eager Asgardians?” Coulson asked dryly. 

Steve cracked a grin at Thor’s sheepish expression. 

“Forgive my earlier untruth,” Thor muttered. “It was necessary to distract you, and keep the knowledge of the Tesseract from all but we who remembered it.”

Coulson waved a hand. “It’s all right, Thor. Half of me approves, anyway.” He frowned. “It’s weird. Like I’m… disagreeing with myself.”

“Hey, we should start a club,” Bruce suggested with a roll of his eyes. “Unpleasant Alter-Egos Anonymous.”

“Are you calling me unpleasant, Banner?” Coulson asked lightly, and Bruce tilted his head.

“From what Nat tells me you could overcome the Other Guy with the sheer power of your paperwork,” Bruce drawled. 

“Do you think they would be willing to help us, Thor?” Steve asked, ignoring them. 

“I believe they would be most pleased to,” Thor said. “I will go and seek them now, if you wish.”

Steve nodded. “The sooner the better. I mean, no offence to Asgardian hospitality,” he added hastily, but Thor gave him an understanding smile as he stood. 

“We will retrieve him, Steven. Fear not,” he said, striding inside with the regal manner that only Thor could exude.

“Hey, I died and you lot still wouldn’t leave me alone,” Coulson said, voice dry as a desert. 

“Are you actually making jokes about that?” Bruce asked, eyes wide. Steve had spend more time with the unfriendly Coulson but it was the stumbling, awkward man he remembered more, and it was somehow reassuring to hear him joke.

Coulson shrugged. “It’s my funeral and I’ll laugh if I want to?”

Bruce choked. 

Steve blinked. “I hope that was a reference.”

Coulson just smiled, and the slightly dopey tinge at the edge when he looked at Steve made Steve’s tension lift. Just a little.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is turning out longer than expected. One more part after this.


	3. I believe the sun still rises here

It was closing in on midday by the time Thor returned, and Steve had managed not to snap at anyone. Coulson had left after breakfast to check on Natasha and Clint, but Steve suspected he needed some time alone. A whole new life’s worth of memories suddenly awakening in your head had to throw a person for a loop, even if that person was Coulson. Bruce seemed to need the quiet as much as Steve, and the two of them passed the time lost in their own heads. 

Thor swept onto the terrace with his usual flare. “Ho, shield brothers!”

Steve felt his stomach churn in equal parts hope and trepidation. “What did they say?”

Thor’s smile dimmed slightly. “They can help us, but not in the most… straightforward manner.”

“What does that mean?” Steve asked, his hands tensing on the table. 

Thor took a seat, fiddling with his cape. “It is the manner of the curse. It presents problems for the magic my parents wield, problems that cannot be surmounted, only… sidestepped. They cannot bring Tony back.”

Steve felt the air rush out of his lungs like the Hulk had socked him in the solar plexus. 

Bruce frowned. “But they say they can help, right? How?”

“To alter the fabric of the curse from here would risk unmaking Midgard wholly. That is something we cannot chance, but there is another way. If we use the Bifrost to travel back to the point of departure between the divergent plane and our own, we may return the timeline to its rightful state.”

Steve blinked, still struggling to breathe while parsing that statement, but Bruce nodded, his expression grim. “So we go back and save Tony from getting shot, and hope that fixes it.”

Thor nodded. “Correct.”

Steve shot to his feet. “What are we waiting for, then?”

“Steve, Clint and Natasha are still injured,” Bruce reminded him. “We can’t go until they’re healed.” 

Steve felt his eyelid twitch. He wanted to _go_ , to do something, _anything_. He hadn’t felt this helpless since the serum, not even when he was being paraded around like a circus freak. All he could do was wait for other people to figure it out and tell him what to do when all he wanted to do was find something to beat the tar off to give them Tony back. 

Steve really hated feeling useless. 

Thor cocked his head, his eyes old and too knowing. “Let us confer with our companions and determine when this is likely to be.”

Steve nodded, and they started back to the healing rooms. Thor eyed Steve speculatively, and he tried not to fidget. 

“Should we go see your parents, too? I mean, it feels rude, not to thank them for their hospitality,” Steve said, scratching the back of his neck. 

Thor shook his head. “Normally, this would be true, but they are deep in conference over our predicament, and have requested not to be disturbed for matters not regarding the coming spell.”

“Spell?” Steve asked.

“Magic is tech here, Steve,” Bruce offered. “Just really advanced tech.”

Steve let himself smile a little. “Maybe it’s just as well Tony’s not here. He’d hate that.”

“We’d never hear the end of it,” Bruce agreed with a roll of his eyes.

Natasha was awake when the three of them entered her room, her bruising nearly gone. She lifted an eyebrow and Thor filled her in. 

“Well, I’m healed,” she said, smiling. “I’m just exploiting silk sheets and room service at this point. I think it’ll be at least another day until Clint’s fighting fit, though. Coulson’s in with him but they’re both asleep right now.” Her eyes flickered to Steve and he tried not to visibly tense. Well, tense more. 

“That is what I have been told, also,” Thor said, and turned to Steve. “Captain, what action would you have us take?”

Steve took a deep breath. “Bruce, go with Thor and try to find out everything you can about this procedure to send us back. We can’t afford to make _any_ mistakes.”

Bruce nodded. “Sure, Cap. Ready, big guy?” he asked Thor. 

“Certainly.”

Bruce turned to Natasha, but the smile on his lips twisted into something awkward and strange, and he spun to stride out the room. Thor followed with a wave for Steve and a confused frown. 

Steve looked down at Natasha. “What was that about?”

She pursed her lips. “That would be precisely none of your business, Captain,” she said, her voice icy like he usually only ever heard on mission over comms. Steve had seen her slip on a persona before, but it never ceased to surprise him, how believable it was, or how smooth the transition, like she was shrugging on a shawl instead of a whole new identity. He would never know, to look at her, that behind that steely-eyed glare lay the Natasha who beat Tony at Wii Bowling, who hated camomile tea with a passion, who had talked him out of some of the worst flashbacks he’d had since waking up.

He sighed, reaching up to pinch the bridge of his nose. The tension in his body had travelled up his spine and settled in his head, and he felt like any sudden moves and it would explode. 

“You okay there, Steve?” Natasha asked in her normal tone.

He chuckled, thick and dark. “God, I don’t even know right now.” 

“You look like you either need to hit something or lie down,” she said. 

Steve lifted his head. “That’s exactly what I need. You’ll be okay here?”

She smiled. “I’m going to pretend for both our sakes you didn’t ask that.”

“Yeah. Okay. Good. I’m going to go and find a punching bag or something.” Now that the idea had taken hold his muscles were itching for it. 

“I’ll let Coulson and Clint know what’s going on when they wake up,” she called after him, and Steve just nodded jerkily to her on his way out. 

“Fine, good, yes.”

A series of blank faced servants directed him through the winding halls of the palace to the training rooms. Steve arrived at a jog, and the sight of the hanging bag in the centre of the room sent relief and fizzing anticipation running through his veins. 

It was all he could do to wait long enough to find bandages and wrap his hands before he was circling the old leather bag. Rolling his shoulders, testing his form, controlling his breathing. It was familiar and easy, and soon enough his punches started to connect. Light at first. Gauging the weight of the bag, the swing on the downstroke. It was heavy, heavier than most, and he started to hit harder. Put his shoulder into it. Swung from the waist. Breathe out, heavy and fast. Pivot on his hip. Sidestep lightly. Arms loose. Fingers curled but not tense. One two. Jab cross. Uppercut cross jab in combination, and again, and again, again again again again. 

The bag sailed through the air and landed with a heavy thud up against the stone wall. Steve heaved for breath, the sweat running freely down his back and his face, blurring his sight. 

Steve sighed, pretended it didn’t sound like a sob, like he wasn’t choking on the emotions clawing their way up his throat. He hadn’t felt so lost for a long time. He’d been acclimating without even realising it, taken certain things as given and for granted, as constant and immutable. Like they couldn’t change. Like he’d always have time. He’d started to believe that, and now all he felt was lost, and so very stupid.

If there was anyone who should know that nothing was guaranteed, if was Steve. 

Peggy’s dark eyes came unbidden to his mind, how they’d looked that awful night in the ruins of a bombed-out bar with a bottle of wine and a soul’s worth of grief. Allow Bucky his choice, she’d told him, and Steve had sniffed and swallowed down his tears, pretending his eyes weren’t swollen, saying something tough to hide in. 

He had no one to hide from here, so he let himself fall to slowly sit on the sawdust floor. He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, his fingers twisting in his hair, and just breathed. 

Steve imagined what she would say to him now, in the dusty dark of the training room. Maybe that nothing in life was forever, and he shouldn’t have forgotten that. He had to wake up. He had to start living, not just existing. She’d done it, and it was the least she’d expect of him in return. 

_Don’t grieve yourself into a grave, Steve._

Steve just breathed, and for the first time, he thought he would be okay with letting Peggy go. 

Natasha wasn’t in her bed when he returned to her recovery room, and Steve rapped his knuckles on the door to the adjoining room. 

“Stop looming and get in here, Rogers,” Clint yelled. 

Steve opened the door with a relieved smile, and Clint grinned widely from his huge Asgardian-sized bed. Coulson sat propped up against the headboard beside him, papers strewn everywhere, and barely looked up from his frantic scribbling.

Steve laid a hand on Clint’s shoulder, eyeing in the bandaging spanning most of his chest. “I’m glad you’re okay, Hawkeye.”

Clint just grinned wider. “Never been better, Cap. You have to try the shit they use for morphine here. I can barely feel my face.”

“How reassuring,” Coulson muttered, shuffling his papers. 

“What’s that?” Steve asked, pulling up a chair to the bedside. Coulson looked up distractedly. 

“Lists.”

Steve blinked. “Lists.”

“Lists,” said Clint, his eyes foggy with either fondness or the Asgardian morphine, Steve couldn’t tell which. “He fucking loves lists. Seriously, it’s a kink or something. I never get him flowers or chocolate, just notebooks. Or fancy pens. Gets him hotter than anything.”

“Yes, by all means, tell my childhood idol about our sex life, Barton.”

Steve choked a little, but Clint beamed. “But sir, accurate information about the interpersonal relationships of subordinates is essential to the optimal performance of a commanding officer.”

“I’m sure the Captain would be happy to live on the edge, this once,” Coulson said, voice dry as dust.

Steve coughed politely into his fist. “Yes. Um. How are you feeling, Clint?”

“High, Cap. Hiiiiiiiiiiigh.”

Coulson sighed. “He should be back to full health by tomorrow morning at the latest, according to the doctors.”

“That’s good news,” Steve said. “And, um, you? Coulson? Are you feeling – you know, at your best?”

Coulson looked up from his paper and met Steve’s look steadily. “Yes. I’m ready, for whatever happens next.”

Steve nodded, but before he could reply Bruce, Thor and Natasha walked in. Steve snapped to high alert at the expressions on their faces.

“What is it?” he barked, body standing to attention on instinct.

Bruce and Natasha shared a look. Steve had never seen Natasha look that openly worried, and that, more than anything, sent a spike of fear through his gut.

“The Allfather and my mother have completed their preparations,” Thor said, but even he was frowning. 

“That’s good, right?” Clint asked. “We go back, stop the bullet and presto! Tony Stark, genius at large.”

“There is a problem,” Thor said, “one that my parents did not anticipate.”

“What is it?” Steve asked. 

“The curse is – Bruce, what is that word you used?”

“Sentient,” Bruce said. “It’s aware. So we can’t just enter the timeline and alter its course like we thought. It’ll know, and circumvent the action we take. It will protect itself, and do what it needs to survive.”

Steve blinked. “So – what does that mean, exactly? How do we stop it? How do we get Tony back?”

Thor breathed a heavy sigh, and Natasha reached out to take Bruce’s hand without a word. 

“There is but one way, but the chances of success are… slim,” Thor said, voice low and grave. 

“So what is it?” Steve snapped.

“One of our number must be transmuted, allowing them to do battle with this curse within its own realm, on its own terms.”

Steve looked to Bruce, wordlessly asking for help. Bruce flinched, and Steve saw his hand tighten around Natasha’s. “He means the curse is based in a different dimension. Frigga and Odin can send us there, but it’s not – it’s a one way trip. To get there, one of us has to die.”

Steve felt the world drawing away from him, like he was seeing it from the end of a long tunnel, his body flooded with sudden calm. 

“Well. Okay then. Natasha, you’re in command. Bruce, I trust you’ll explain it all when you’re all back at the Tower. Coulson, we’re happy to have you back. Clint, don’t get shot again. Thor, take me to your parents. Let’s do this now.”

“What? Cap, are you crazy?” Clint yelled, but one glare from Steve shut him up. 

“We did this,” Steve said, his voice gone low and harsh. “We made this world. I have to fix it. Not just for Tony. For everyone. We’re Avengers. Making the world better is supposed to be our job.”

“It doesn’t have to be you, Steve,” Bruce muttered, and Natasha nodded.

Steve smiled, feeling affection for his team well in his chest. “Yes, it does. That’s an order, Dr Banner.” 

Bruce looked desperately unhappy but he nodded, his face pale and pinched. Natasha wore the carefully blank expression he recognised as the one Tony called her ‘game face’. Clint was clearly confused, but Coulson’s hand on his kept him quiet. Coulson himself eyed Steve with a level gaze. 

“Captain, it’s been a pleasure,” he said finally, and Steve could only manage to nod. His throat was thick, and his skin felt too tight, but there was no question in his mind that this was the right decision. 

“It’s been an honour to serve with you all,” he said, barely recognising his own voice, before he turned and strode out of the room, Thor on his heels. 

“Are you certain this is what you wish to do, Steven?” Thor asked as they walked through the golden halls of Asgard. It was a truly stunning city, Steve realised. He was fortunate to have seen it. Not many people could have such beauty as their last sight.

“I’m sure, Thor. Tony would do it for me.” And he would, Steve knew. Tony would cut the wire, even if the wire was the last thing keeping him alive. Tony wouldn’t even think about it, and Steve didn’t need to, either. He wondered about the tragic irony of him realising _why_ right then. He would die to save Tony, gladly, and was doing so. He didn’t feel sad. He’d had a longer life than he’d had any right to, met people worth ten of himself, been given a second chance at life almost literally. He would give that second chance to Tony, and give it with joy in his heart. 

Because he loved him. 

“Steve?” Thor whispered when they reached the door to Odin’s chambers, and Steve realised that he was crying. 

“No, Thor, it’s not – I’m not sad. Or scared,” he said, and it was true. “I just wish I could have seen Tony again. Told him how sorry I was. Because I didn’t mean it. I could never mean it.”

Thor smiled sadly, and in that smile Steve saw once again a being who had watched millennia turn and lives flare out with all the permanence of candle flame. “I know. I will tell him, I swear this to you.”

Steve thought he smiled back, but all he could see were memories swirling like mist in his head. Tony, smiling over a cup of coffee in the quiet grey of dawn, teasing Clint with a glint in his eye, drunk out of his mind but still smart as a whip, flying with all the grace of a dancer, and Steve wondered how he could have been such an idiot as to never know that he needed Tony like air to breathe.

Vaguely he registered that meeting Odin and Frigga in their chamber, noticed something cast about his head. His sight went dark. He felt distantly the sharp pain of a knife between his ribs, the stutter of his heart as it tried to beat on but could not. His breath slowed and the tears dried cold on his cheeks, and it seemed to him that in his mind’s eye, Tony turned to him, surprised. “Cap?”

Steve couldn’t reply, he had no breath, but Tony just smiled with that wicked glint and held out a hand. 

Steve took it and the world went white. 

\-- 

Things come back to him slowly. 

The place where he wakes is amorphous light, and Steve feels strangely buoyant. The weight of his muscles is gone, and he sits up to see a happily familiar sight. 

Tony is spry, lithe, frenzied with activity, calling things to them in the misty white expanse. Soon there’s less white, replaced instead the impression of blue light and hard grey steel. Tony’s workshop forms around them, familiar but somehow wrong. Off. Steve can’t say what’s wrong with it exactly, can’t think much of anything, like his head’s wrapped in cotton wool.

Tony turns to grin at him. 

“I’m glad you’re here, Cap, I’ll tell you that. Been bored out of my mind here alone.”

That’s odd, for sure. Tony’s never alone, not for long, whether it’s a leggy swimsuit model in his bed or Bruce in the lab or the droll patient voice of JARVIS everywhere else. Steve always feels two steps behind, running to catch up, left spinning in Tony’s dust. 

“Why were you alone?” Steve asks, tongue too thick in his mouth, voice scratchy like he hasn’t spoken in weeks. He’s in his Captain America uniform, the very first one. His chorus girl outfit. It fits him strangely, though. Sagging and loose.

Tony cocks his head. “Can’t say, exactly. Things are… well, they’re a bit muddy. It’s irritating.”

Steve nods slowly. “Yeah, I know. I’m muddy, too.” There’s something he’s supposed to be doing. Something that he promised to do. It’s important, maybe the most important thing he’s ever—

“So why are you here, Cap?” Tony asks, playing with a hologram of the Iron Man suit, spinning it out and fiddling with the guts. 

“I can’t remember.”

“Ain’t that a bitch,” Tony says. It’s silent. No JARVIS, no ‘cock rock’ blasting on the speakers, no whirr as Tony’s robots buzz around his feet.

“I need to – there’s something important I have to do,” Steve says, starting to feel something like panic. It’s not exactly like, more what he used to feel when he was sick and his mother would dose his milk with whiskey to help him sleep. He feels floaty and strange, and the strangeness should scare him but he can’t quite get the fear to connect.

“Alright,” Tony says, turning to face him. “We’ll ask him.”

Steve frowns. “Him?”

Tony smiles, but it looks brittle, and Steve thinks it would shatter if he touched it. All of Tony looks like that, really. 

“Sure,” Tony says, trying for glib and failing. “I lied. I wasn’t alone. Just wishful thinking, really.”

Steve doesn’t understand, but then the workshop vanishes into puffs of oily grey smoke. A meaty hand materialises to land heavily on Tony’s shoulder. Tony goes chalky white, his veins puffy and dark. He’s choking and there’s a horrible dark hole in his chest where it should be glowing with light and life. A bald man is giving Steve a shark’s toothy smile over Tony’s trembling body.

“Steve,” the man says, and Steve knows who it is. Knows what it is, too, and it’s not Obadiah Stane, no matter what face it’s using. 

Steve doesn’t bother to reply, just pulls the shield from his back and lets it fly. 

It’s a pathetic throw. The Stane copy fades into mist, and the shield lands with a dull thud at Tony’s feet. Tony is slumped on his chair, heaving in breaths that sound raw and painful. Steve looks around, tries desperately to find the thing wearing Stane’s face, but the smoke is everywhere and Steve can’t see a target to hit. 

It’s then he looks down and connects the loose-fitting body, the strange lightness of his body, the weakness of his throw. He lifts his arm, and it’s twig-thin. His glove swallows his hand, more an oven mitt than a glove. 

“Tony,” he chokes, but Tony’s dealing with his own fears, scrabbling at the hole in his chest. 

_Ah, Captain_ , a voice whispers from behind him. Steve whirls but there’s nothing there, just the grey haze.

“What do you want with me?” he asks, putting as much steel behind his voice as he can. 

_Are you trying to use your Cap voice on me?_ It sounds amused, and totally unthreatened, like Steve is a puppy with its slippers. _You’re not Captain America here, you know._

Steve swallows. Flexes his hands in the too-big gloves. “I know. I’m not here as Captain America. I’m here as Steve Rogers.”

The smoke billows and writhes until the Red Skull stands before him, mocking smile twisting its hideous lips. “How nice,” it says. “You think you can defeat me?”

“I’ve beaten you before.”

The smile twists, turns vicious. “Oh, no indeed. You have no idea what I am, what I can do to you, to your precious _schatz_ over there.”

Steve opens his mouth to counter, but the thing wearing Red Skull’s hateful face stops him. “Don’t tell me. You’re about to offer yourself in his stead? Captain, Captain, Captain,” it tuts, and morphs into Peggy. 

“I know you, Steve,” it says, in a grotesque parody of the soft voice Peggy had used in the car in Brooklyn, the last time he’d looked like this. “I’ve seen into your heart, and granted your wish. It’s not my fault you don’t know how to appreciate a gift.”

It lifts a hand to his cheek, cupping it tenderly like Peggy never had the chance to, and Steve feels hatred like he never has before. 

His tiny hands are around its stolen throat before it can escape, and Steve squeezes. _On its own terms_ , Thor had said. Steve can do that. 

It fights him. Of course it does. But it’s chosen its form and now that Steve has his hands on it, it can do nothing but rail at him. Peggy’s eyes widen, her red lips curl in a snarl, and the thing using her face scrabbles at Steve with her long, polished fingernails. They fall to the floor, Steve on top, and he uses the leverage to press down harder. His arms are bleeding and it claws at his face, but Steve feels no pain. Feels nothing, really. He just presses harder.

Soon, though, soon it weakens. It kicks and spasms, but its tongue has gone blue and its eyes are bulging. Still, Steve doesn’t let go. He won’t take the chance. He keeps the hold tight and sure, until his arms are trembling and he starts to feel faint.

“Steve?”

Steve turns to look, and Tony is crouched on the floor just beyond the thing’s feet. He’s a more normal colour, and the arc reactor glows a bright and reassuring blue in his chest. 

“Are you okay?” Steve asks, because he has to, can’t go another second without hearing Tony answer that question.

Tony grins. It’s unsure and a little confused, but there’s a little of that trademark Tony Stark mischief that Steve has been missing. Not much, but enough. 

“Hey, I’m fine, really, good as new, or, you know, lightly used but, umm. I’m pretty sure it’s dead.”

Steve looks down. The body is cold. Steve doesn’t know how much that means here, exactly, or if he really killed it. God, he hopes so. He prays with every bit of him that the thing that made his worst wish come true is dead and gone.

He lets its neck go gradually, his knuckles creaking and aching with every degree. Finally he can scramble off it, crab-walking awkwardly back to sit by Tony. 

Tony just hums and pokes Steve’s thigh. “So,” he says, drawing it out the way he always does before he says something sure to get Steve’s blood pressure up. Steve is so happy to hear it. “What’s with Original Flavour Steve?”

Steve shrugs. “I don’t know. Thor wasn’t real clear about the rules when he sent me here.” He looks away from the body, shuffles so he can watch Tony instead. He’s gone so long without it, what feels like years instead of days. 

Tony cocks his head and looks at him with a strange expression that Steve can’t interpret. Of course, he’s used to strange things that he can’t interpret around Tony. Somehow, it’s comforting. 

“You came to rescue me,” Tony says. 

Steve nods. 

“Now you’ve done that.”

Steve nods again, a bit hesitantly.

“So now what? How do we get back?” Tony asks. “I don’t remember what the hell happened, you’ll have to fill me in, and I know it must have been a real struggle without me to puzzle it out for you, but just tell me there was an exit planned to your white-horse routine. And for the love of god, tell me Reed Richards didn’t go anywhere near my Tower. Please. I could not handle that.”

“Reed Richards went nowhere near your tech.” He can reasonably assume that, anyway. JARVIS is like a Rottweiler when it comes to Tony’s safety, mental and otherwise, and Richards tends to not believe in things like safeguards when it came to science. “And there’s a plan. Don’t worry.”

He can’t have hidden his emotions as well as he meant to, because Tony immediately drops the faux-relieved act and pins Steve with a stare. “But? I hear a ‘but’, Rogers.”

Steve smiles, and he lets his heart show through it. This place, wherever they are, is freeing. It’s not what he expected of death, but since he met Tony Stark, nothing’s really gone as expected. Seeing Tony one more time, hearing him ramble, is all Steve could have asked for. _Did_ ask for. He also looks a little hazy, and Steve realises he’s out of time. 

“There’s no ‘but’, Tony. You’re going home. That’s what I came here to do,” Steve says, and Tony looks like he’s going to argue, so Steve keeps talking. “I did what I had to. I’d do it again, a thousand times, okay?” He’s still smiling, and there are tears in his eyes, but they’re tears of happiness, because Tony is flailing and arguing like he always does, angry and frustrated and _alive_ , goddamnit, _alive_. 

Tony is almost see-through now, and he’s realised what’s happening.

“Steve, you better be coming with me or I swear to God I will—”

Steve interrupts him with a hand on his mouth. “I love you.” 

Tony shuts up, eyes gone comically wide, and Steve grins so wide he thinks he might split his face in two. “I made this choice, because there wasn’t another to make, not for me.”

Tony’s shakes his head frantically. Steve can see smoke through his eyes, which are shining. “No, no, you’re coming with me, this is _not an option_ , Steve—”

And then Tony’s gone, and Steve’s name echoes through the formless void. 

Steve doesn’t know quite what to expect, then. He believes in God, went to church growing up, prays in the dark of his room at night. Hopes that his mother is somewhere with light and music and no more pain. Beyond that, he’s not sure. Sitting in stormy grey haze hadn’t figured high on his theological assumptions about the afterlife. 

He’s happy, though. Content. He’d done what he’d meant to do, and set things right. The world didn’t need Steve Rogers to go on spinning. It did need Tony Stark. His team is safe, and Steve has discharged his duty to the best of his ability. 

He lies back, and closes his eyes. 

\--- 

Steve opened his eyes, feeling like something had curled up and died under his tongue. There was nothing but fur and foul taste in his mouth, and a pounding headache pulsed behind his eyes. 

God, he hadn’t felt this sick since that bout of pneumonia a few years ago. He checked his breathing automatically, and relaxed a little when there was no tightness to his chest or rasp to his breath. The illness hadn’t gone to his lungs, then. Not yet. 

And then Steve sat bolt upright, ignoring the nausea and the pain. 

“JARVIS?”

“ _Good morning, Captain Rogers. The time is seven twenty-three in the morning. The weather is a pleasant seventy-four degrees, and the—_ ” 

“The date, JARVIS, what’s the date?” Steve interrupted, feeling his heart rise into his throat (or was that bile? God, he was hung over.)

“ _It is the twenty third of July, two thousand and thirteen, Captain_.”

Steve’s hangover didn’t magically dissipate, and his head hurt worse than ever, but Steve couldn’t stop the grin spreading over his face. “Oh, thank God.”

Steve had prepared enough breakfast to feed even a hung over contingent of Avengers by the time Natasha stumbled into the kitchen. Steve pushed a glass of orange juice and the Advil bottle down the counter to her. 

“Thanks,” she grunted, downing what Steve was sure was over the recommended dosage. Still, nothing could dent his mood. 

She glared at him as he bustled around the kitchen, her eyes narrowed like she couldn’t put her finger on what exactly was off. “Are you… _whistling_?” she hissed.

“Yep.”

“Stop. Please. Before I have to kill you.”

Steve just grinned and flipped a pancake. 

Bruce staggered in next, looking green for a whole new set of reasons. Steve just passed him a serve of his favourite omelette and a chai. 

Clint paused in the doorway, taking in the scene. Natasha was slumped over the counter like a ragdoll, clutching her Bloody Mary like it was all that tethered her to life. Bruce was attempting some sort of self-administered pressure point massage on his face. 

“Cap,” Clint said, his eyes narrowed and bloodshot, “are you wearing an Iron Man apron?”

“The man has taste!” Tony said, clapping Clint on the shoulder and making straight for the coffee machine, ignoring Clint’s wince and dry heave. “I knew there was hope for you yet, Steve.”

Steve grinned, feeling like his face would split and his chest would burst with the force of his happiness. 

“What the hell are you so chipper about, Stark?” Natasha snarled. “You drank enough vodka to kill a horse last night.”

Tony shrugged. “Don’t know, for sure. I feel like a whole new man this morning. Like I’ve been reborn or something,” he said, sounding a little thrown. He recovered his trademark shit-eating grin instantly, though, throwing Steve a wink. “Maybe I’ve finally cracked.”

Steve couldn’t take it for a second longer. He put down the frying pan he’d been washing, turned and took the four long strides to the other side of the kitchen, and grabbed Tony’s arms. 

Tony looked alarmed. “Uh, you okay, Capsicle?”

“Never better. You’re here,” Steve said, like that explained everything, and dipped his head and kissed him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's all, folks! Sorry it took so long - bloody RL.
> 
> I may write an epilogue dealing with the Phil situation, as it really didn't fit in this section - this is Steve's story, after all. Thanks so much to every who left kudos or comments - you seriously made my day every time I got a notification. Thanks for being so nice about my first foray into Avengers fandom :)


	4. news on Phil epilogue/spinoff

Hey everyone!

Firstly, thanks so much for every read, kudos and comment on this story. Ya'll are completely, totally, utterly awesome.

I've gotten a couple of questions about the status of the Phil spinoff/epilogue, and you all deserve some answers. I became sick soon after finishing this, which took away pretty much all my energy and motivation for, well, everything, so I didn't start it, and largely withdrew from The Internet in general. HOWEVER, I am now much better, and with recovery my creativity has returned. So here's the fun news: I think you'll have some Phil closure soon, by the end of May at the latest. 

Sorry for the wait, guys, and for being incommunicado. I'm going to sit and respond to all the comments that I haven't already right now. Thanks for your support of my experiment in free-writing and I hope you'll like the Phil bit :)

 

~Azul_bleu

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a prompt @ avengerkink: "Okay, so I've been on the site for awhile and I couldn't help but notice that Tony is most often than not being the cause of bad relationships, or breaking up something good, etc... However, I want to see something different. [...] I want all the team to individually have a really bad day and they end up blaming it on Tony even if it really wasn't his fault but he had pressured them into the situation. In the end, before they all go to sleep, they all wish Tony was never born and someone (don't care who) decides to grant them their wish. A world without Tony Stark 
> 
> The next day, the team wake up in a world they are not familiar with. A world where Stark Industries (which has been renamed to Stane Industries after Howard's death) never stopped building weapons. Where the Ten Rings dominate the middle east and Justin Hammer works as the President of Stane Industries with Pepper as his overworked and underappreciated secretary.
> 
> I want to see how the Avengers react to see how much Tony actually contributed to society even though he appears to be a screwup. He might have been in the weapons business for years, but people forget that most inventions and discoveries that modernize and help the world were first developed for miliary reasons. However, when the Avengers realize what a big help Tony is, things just don't go back to normal. They have to go back in time and fix Tony not being there."


End file.
